Bridge of Sand

"Burroway is best known for her textbook, Writing Fiction, but in this novel she demonstrates that even skillful writers can stumble. On September 11, 2001, Dana Cleveland sees a distant column of smoke through the window of the limousine carrying her to her husband's funeral. She'll later learn the smoke was from Flight 93, providing the first of many invocations of 9/11 that serve no purpose other than to undermine what would otherwise be a decent novel. Dana leaves Pennsylvania to revisit her roots, and while searching out her grandmother's home in Georgia, she hooks up with childhood infatuation Cassius Huston, who is black, separated from his wife, has a daughter and belongs to a large family who would not approve of Dana, who is white. When the wife threatens Dana, she flees to Pelican Bay, Fla., where she quickly becomes entrenched in the mostly working-class community and grapples with problems that test her in ways she's never anticipated. The complexities of Dana's and Cassius's relationship and of Pelican Bay are finely wrought, but Burroway's exploration of socioeconomic angst is marred by the novel's ghoulish references to 9/11." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Janet Burroway has written a love story that attempts to join issues of race and class, and is embedded firmly in contemporary history. It's a tall order. When we first see Burroway's heroine, Dana Cleveland, she had been married to a Pennsylvania state senator whom she loathed. She intended to leave him, but he came down with cancer, so she nursed him until his death. His funeral occurs on 9/11, and... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) almost no one turns up: Is it because of the national cataclysm, or because no one could stand him?

Dana, in a fit of depression and emotional paralysis, strips a hutch — that is, she refinishes a huge piece of kitchen furniture — and talks on the phone to her best friend, Phoebe, who seems to exist only to receive Dana's calls; we never hear anything of Phoebe's life. Dana is 38 and has been a traditional wife; she was an art major in college and has no skills to speak of. She is also an orphan and has no ties. The question for her now is what to do for the rest of her life.

She intends to drive to California but inexplicably heads south, to Brunswick, Ga., where she spent some time in her teens with her grandma. Once in Brunswick, Dana looks up a boy she barely knew in the grocery store where she used to work part time. His name is Cassius Huston; he's her age and African American. He agrees to meet her at a public beach, and after an afternoon of tense conversation, they adjourn to a resort hotel and enjoy several days and nights of passion. Then he goes back to work and disappears. Dana is crazed with loss. After she receives a hand-written death threat from Cassius' wife, Dana heads farther south, to the Florida Panhandle and an obscure grocery store called Solly's Corners, which is located inland on a rickety street that connects the Gulf to a brackish pond. Whites live on one side of this road, blacks on the other. Cassius has said there's a cottage behind this store and that his aunt lives there.

Instead of an African American aunt, Solly is an old white guy, very affable. Dana does indeed rent the cottage and spends several weeks swimming and acquainting herself with the local biracial community. The pace here is slow, excruciatingly slow.

But two women come into play here, a stocky, taciturn African American named Trudy, who is in fact Cassius' aunt — though she is slow to reveal that information — and Adena, who is Solly's niece by marriage, white and up to no good. When Solly has a stroke, he stays alive long enough to will his store and the 43 acres that go with it to Dana, who really is just a passing stranger. Dana learns that Trudy has been Solly's mistress and that Adena has designs on the property. Dana doesn't want the property. She's there only to wait for Cassius, but she learns to run the store and risks another trip to Brunswick, has another rendezvous with Cassius, receives yet another death threat, this time from the Bible-thumping brother of Cassius, and heads back to Florida. Soon Cassius is on the run, along with his little daughter, Kenisha, away from his death-threatening wife. And Luther, the death-threatening brother, is on the prowl for Dana, and is now living in his car just outside the store. It further develops that Trudy has been banished for 18 years from this same family because she had the infernal nerve to hook up with a white man.

The plot, which is placid for two-thirds of the book, finally begins to speed up. Dana (and the author) plainly has ambitions to meld both race and social class through passion, and in a peaceful fashion, but what are we to make of a family of African Americans who use death threats as their main form of communication? Poor Cassius gets very few lines — his main function is to be an object of desire, and even Trudy speaks only in gnomic utterances: "Ain't nobody safe. Ain't nobody gets all they want."

Will this widow of a Pennsylvania state senator get what she wants? The real question is: Why would she want it, and why is the author so bruisingly tough on the family — and the race — she supposedly admires?

Reviewed by Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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