South Bound

Kaye Gibbons's sweet debut

Goodness doesn't need a halo to make itself known. Sometimes a simple soapy shine will do. "I live in a clean brick house and mostly I am left to myself. When I start to carry an odor I take a bath and folks tell me how sweet I look." Written with a pretty twang, Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster (Algonquin Books) is The Color Purple of po' white trash. Composed in a mere six weeks, Gibbons's debut novel has a funny, quick release and an enveloping spell. It's a triumph of southern voice and peculiarity. Trying on a new dress, Ellen is.. .transported. "It is like nothing you have ever seen especially when I put it on and gazed in the store mirror I said Lord I could fall in love with my own self." Ellen's conceit isn't self-love, it's self-reliance—girlish grit in the

face of male menace. Her own father's a lewd pisspot. "My daddy was a mistake for a person. ... He had parked his truck in the flower bed the special handicapped children had planted. Later that day when they saw the mashed ground and the obvious dead marigolds they each threw little separate fits."

Ellen Foster is a homemade product that should give its readers little separate fits of hap-

piness. It isn't a flawless book— its lessons are applied with too much syrup—but it has the integrity of an achieved vision. Just turned twenty-seven, Gibbons says her next novel is levitating "somewhere between my mind and, my journal." In the meantime, "I hope people're gonna be kind to of Ellen Foster." This is one time the kindness of strangers seems assured.

JAMES WOLCOTT

Ellen Foster is The Color Purple of po' white trash.

-JAMES WOLCOTT