Kate Wheeler's short stories make for effortless travel between places as disparate as the pantry of an Argentine villa and the basement of a Burmese monastery. Her characters are often self-absorbed American women in faraway places searching for spiritual resolution but finding themselves disillusioned.
Perhaps because Wheeler spent most of her childhood shuttling among several South American countries, she is blessed with an uncanny ability to summon up a foreign ethos in a brief description. In the story "Improving My Average," a young girl recounting her family's short slay in Cartagena recalls dancing with a lame maid. "We hardly needed music, for in Cartagena an itching syncopation lived in the air itself. On that big balcony we pursued each other, wriggling our shoulders like lovesick pigeons, burning each other's faces with imaginary candles."
Stringing together all Wheeler's tales is the thread of spiritual yearning, epitomized in the story "Snow Leopard, Night Bird." A few followers of a New Age guru in Mill Valley, Calif., discover that their so-called "liberated" teacher is actually abusing his spiritual power. In "Ringworm," a woman, forced to leave a Burmese monastery prematurely because of political unrest, learns that her most profound spiritual connection after five months of meditation has been with a stray cat. This collection, decorated by both 0. Henry and Best American Short Story prizes, is the skillful work of a fiercely self-examining writer in search of a peace that becomes, again and again, the goal of her restless characters. (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95)
by Mark Childress
To 12-year-old Peejoe, it promises to be just another Alabama summer: "The while folks looked happy, the colored folks were largely invisible, and the dogs had enough sense to lie down in the shade." He couldn't be more wrong. For in the summer of 1965, the surging civil rights movement will forever alter the world, even as little white boys like Peejoe know it. And in his case, there will be personal upheaval to match—caused by his beautiful, brazen and almost certainly crazy Aunt Lucille.
As the novel opens, Lucille declares her independence from what she considers an oppressive life by murdering her oafish husband, Chester, dumping their six brats with her mother and hightailing it for Hollywood to audition for The Beverly Hillbillies—toting Chester's severed head along in a Tupperware lettuce keeper. She quickly takes to the role of desperado, seducing, stealing and, if necessary, shooting her way cross-country. Meanwhile, back home, orphans Peejoe and his older brother, Wiley, embark on a darker series of adventures. Their beloved grandmother must ship them off to live with her undertaker son in a small town that turns into a flash point of civil rights strife.
Less sure hands than those of Childress (the 'Bama-born author of three critically acclaimed novels) might easily have fumbled these dual stories, with their frequent shifts in tone and their bold juxtaposition of a people's struggle for freedom against that of one probably dizzy woman. But somehow he makes it work. By turns comic, tragic and, most of all, moving, Crazy in Alabama is a heartfelt original that cuts to the quick. (Putnam, $22.95)
>Kate Wheeler
LOOKING FOR A ROOM OF HER OWN
"I SPENT THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF MY life in Tulsa, the next two weeks in New Orleans and then...Venezuela," says Kale Wheeler, 38. "It seems like I've always lived out of a suitcase." The daughter of an American Exxon executive, Wheeler grew up in South America. "For me, the United States was trips I made to Florida with my mother and my two younger sisters, and the fitting rooms of Jordan Marsh department store, where my mother would buy our clothes three sizes large—for the long haul," she says. "Although I wanted to believe that I was a South American, the South Americans wouldn't have me."
From the age of 12, the writer has been searching for her own country. "I'm descended from spirit seekers," she says. "The Scottish Presbyterians on my father's side drove all over Texas in a buggy, preaching." The author's spiritual search intensified when, after receiving a master's in creative writing at Stanford University, she had to choose between "going to write in New York City or taking care of my mother until she died of breast cancer." After choosing the latter, Wheeler, grieving, spent 2½ years at a meditation center in New England and then took short-term vows as a Buddhist nun in Burma. Today she teaches meditation and travels the world with her boyfriend, Jell' Miller, 42, an ordained Buddhist lama. "He speaks Tibetan with a Long Island accent," says Wheeler, adding, "We'd like to settle clown. I've always thought my home was somewhere else, a place I'd come back to. But it has never turned out that way."
>SOMETHING TO CHEW ON LOOKING FOR WEIGHT-LOSS WISDOM? Here's the skinny on the latest mega-selling diet primers:
STOP THE INSANITY! by Susan Powter She once weighed 260 lbs. Lighter now by half, the Queen of Infomercials has cooked up a weight-loss guide stuffed with juicy personal stories and tips like how to read fat-content labels. It also bursts with her pow-pow-Powter style as she cheers readers on and rails against foods that are "white, loaded with sugar and oiled to the max." (Simon & Schuster, $22)
EAT MORE, WEIGH LESS by Dean Ornish, M.D. Ornish claims that with his fat-free, meat-fish-chicken-free regimen, you can not only reverse heart disease but eat huge amounts of complex carbs and drop pounds. So you'd rather nibble on a boot than broccoli? Ornish includes recipes by chefs like Spago's Wolfgang Puck that may change your mind. (HarperCollins, $22.50)
OUTSMARTING THE FEMALE EAT CELL by Debra Waterhouse, M.P.H., R.D.
This book sets forth a depressing, if controversial, theory: Women have larger fat cells, thanks not only to the hormone estrogen but to more fat-storing enzymes. To outwit these cells, Waterhouse offers user-friendly solutions. One helpful trick? Imagine extra pasta servings as fat globules on your hips—then say no. (Hyperion, $17.95)
THE NEW FIT OR EAT by Covert Bailey This slender volume concentrates not on food but on burning body fat through exercise. Says Bailey: "Exercise longer, not harder." Declaring that you need to work out only 12 minutes a day, he weighs in with this advice for tyros: "Don't exercise with a fit friend. You end up gelling injured while they think it was nothing." (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95)
- Contributors:
- Joseph Olshan,
- Pam Lambert,
- Marjorie Rosen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
