SOURCE: “Kaye Gibbons (1960-),” in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 156-68.

Kaye Gibbons has now published two more novels since she burst upon the public's awareness with her 1987 novel, Ellen Foster, to acclaim and awards. She has shown herself to be a skillful, imaginative, sensitive, and interesting novelist, who has taken the perseverance of the human spirit and Nash County, North Carolina, where she grew up, for her continuing literary domain, as she explores its people, ways, and past. Her work is bold and experimental, but easily accessible, winning for her a large body of readers. She is young, but already established, and not breaking stride as she continues to produce challenging and satisfying fiction at a steady pace.

BIOGRAPHY

The daughter of a tobacco farmer, Charles Batts, and his wife, Alice, who lived in the rural Nash County community of Bend of the River (near the Tar River), about seven miles south of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Kaye Batts was born on May 5, 1960, in a hospital in Wilson, North Carolina. She has a brother 13 years older than she, and a sister 9 years older. They are related to Nathaniel Batts, the first-known permanent white settler in North Carolina, who built a home in coastal North Carolina in 1655. She grew up on the family's farm in Nash County, which is in the upper center of the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina, experiencing the agricultural seasons and hot summers and being relatively poor.

Gibbons greatly admired her mother, who was called Shine and who provided order and stability through perseverance and hard work. After her mother killed herself at age 47 with an overdose of pills in March 1970, Gibbons stayed on with her father until she went to live with her mother's sister near Bailey, North Carolina, in 1971. This was not a satisfactory arrangement, and after Gibbons' alcoholic father died in May 1972 she moved to a foster home, also near Bailey, which she had chosen partly on the basis of observing at church the woman whose home it was. During 1972–73 she also had extended visits with various other relatives. In June 1973 her brother married, and she moved into his home in Rocky Mount and benefited from the interest in her shown by his wife. She lived there until she entered North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, in fall 1978, having graduated from Rocky Mount High School.

While growing up, Gibbons had watched television and read as much as possible, early becoming fascinated with both oral and written language and what could be done with it. In the fourth grade she discovered both the fiction and poetry of Poe, and later Shakespeare's sonnets and the works of numerous other writers. At one stage she wanted to be a lab technician, then later a lawyer; and she became more and more interested in the world beyond her immediate environs, and in reading. She also began writing and publishing poetry. She loved school and the discipline, order, stimulation, and opportunities for learning that it provided. In the rather chaotic year after her mother's death, school kept her going. In high school she was somewhat bookish and an outsider, though she also participated in some extracurricular activities. She went to North Carolina State University with a scholarship from the Veterans Administration, and she also worked at the university library. At the university she decided to major in political science, then switched to history, and finally to English, because in it more writing and analyzing of writing were required.

In the summer before she transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in fall 1980, Gibbons had manic-depressive problems, and in August 1981 she entered a hospital in Raleigh, staying there till March 1982, meanwhile again attending classes at North Carolina State. In 1983 she had another attack and remained out of school for some time. During this period she worked at various jobs, including as a waitress and in a bookstore. In 1984 she met Michael Gibbons, 12 years her senior, originally from Queens, New York, then a graduate student in landscape architecture at North Carolina State; and on May 12, 1984, they were married. They have three daughters—Mary (1984), Leslie (1987), and Louise (1989).

In summer 1985 she returned to classes at Chapel Hill, and in the fall she enrolled in Louis Rubin's course in Southern literature. During the course, in Rubin's lectures and in the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Mark Twain, and others, she encountered various emphases on the use of and validity for everyday speech in literature and on the relationships of language and place. Also, a voice came to her which led to her writing the poem “June Bug,” which was eventually published in the Carolina Quarterly, but more immediately was the stimulus for the thirty pages of fiction she began in November 1985 and showed to Rubin. He recognized her talent and at the end of November encouraged her to finish the work. In early January, Rubin had her first novel, Ellen Foster (1987). With little revision, it was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Then, in 1986, while Gibbons was taking a seminar in the Southern novel with Rubin, she wrote an essay on the Miranda stories of Katherine Anne Porter; it was soon published in the Kenyon Review.

Her second novel went through four drafts, the first of which was poor, but which yielded the principal male character for the final version, published by Algonquin as A Virtuous Woman (1989). For each of the first two novels her imagination had depended primarily on her memories and experiences and on those of her family. The third novel, A Cure for Dreams, which went through four drafts before being published by Algonquin (1991), required a good bit of research, the results of which were blended with memories or what Gibbons had heard from relatives and others, as the novel deals with decades before she was born.

In the early stages of work on it she had read Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (edited by Tom Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, University of North Carolina Press, 1978), based on oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project under the direction of W. T. Couch. This led her to the hundreds of such personal histories transcribed by the project from interviews and available at the university library in Chapel Hill. Gibbons read these extensively, gathering not so much characters or actions but mostly metaphors, terms, language patterns, customs, and general ambience. She was impressed with the respect that the project's interviewers had for their subjects, how they helped the person's own voice come through. She also read printed collections of North Carolina folklore. However, while she used in the novel much that she found in her reading, if she needed a term that she did not have, she sometimes made up one of the same type as those she had encountered.

Gibbons' first two novels had been composed on a typewriter. For the third she used a computer. Although she had a study at the North Carolina State University library during 1989 and 1990, as its first (and then reappointed) Writer of the Year, most of her writing is done at home, often at night, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. This schedule helps keep her close to her children, who also are a high priority for her. The obligation has become more important following her recent divorce.

Although she does not plan to read, Gibbons has been a success on the reading circuit, and she makes appearances on radio and television. In October 1989 she shared the platform with Eudora Welty as the two invited speakers to inaugurate the annual Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium as part of the activities for the inauguration of the first woman president of Welty's alma mater, Mississippi University for Women. Gibbons spoke on the influence of Welty in her finding her own self as a writer. Gibbons also occasionally writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals.

Gibbons cherishes the order and stability that her children and her writing provide. She has said that only after writing Ellen Foster could she really be herself and feel good about that. In How I Became a Writer she wrote:

My mother's death both freed me and marked me. … If she was still living, I would still be bound to my old home, and I know I would not have turned to literature and used it as I have.

(5)

I write novels to set order to what memories my mind has allowed me and to create something of lasting value in all those gaps I seem to have.

(4)

My life changed with the marriage and the birth [of my daughter], and the memory of my mother escorted me through the transition from a girl who loved literature better than her life to a woman who overcame her past and got at the business of living.

(5)

As she said to one interviewer: “Between good genes and a harsh environment, I think I turned out OK”; and so have her books, the first two already having sold over 25,000 copies each in hardback and over 40,000 each in paperback.

MAJOR THEMES

Most of the themes that one finds in Gibbons' works fit well what in other contexts she has said are her primary beliefs and concerns as a writer and as a person. She has definite ideas about what she believes she should try to do as a writer, what her concerns are, and how she hopes to present them to the reader. She writes about the “commonplace” things of the everyday lives of her characters in order to show the tensions, passions, opportunities, and effects on the human spirit of this aspect of living (as opposed to, but related to, the larger, more dramatic occurrences), both on the surface and below it. This larger aspect of the experiences of most people also has important value for understanding a character and what that character is, thinks, and does. One reviewer wrote that Gibbons “recounts mundane details of everyday life in such a compelling and innovative way that we are left both stunned and wiser.” She wants the reader to listen to and look at closely this particular richness and how it can lead to art and to fulfilling life, even in its many disguises.

Gibbons emphasizes the quiet, strong heroism of survivors, especially women, who persevere to bring order and peace out of chaos, good and joy out of difficulty, getting through the day, the years, a life, and making the best one can of it all, in spite of mistakes, catastrophes, misunderstandings, threats, injury, inadequate resources, sorrow, grief, disappointment, pain, death, disillusionment, and weariness. She finds hope in the strong, self-reliant individual coping with the quiet dramas and firm challenges of every day's journey and what that requires not only to survive but also to triumph, at least to the point of having inner peace, or even joy in the soul, from taking hold and doing what needs to be done, from bouncing back and going on. In this hope she reflects various aspects of her own experience and the admiration she has for her mother, and the epigraphs for her novels come from Emerson, the Bible, and a statement of belief in the validity of each person's own experience and voice.

She wants her characters to speak to us directly, for themselves, in truth and honesty, about life without illusions. Not only are her principal characters well drawn and memorable, but many of her lesser ones are vividly and well drawn, too, though they tend to pale in the shadows of her dominant first-person central characters. She explores experience in relation to family, in relation to interactions between people who should be close because of birth or because of choice, as through such relationships they try to effect order, stability, happiness, love, and validity for themselves and their existence. Gibbons explores the difficulty of knowing and shaping the self, particularly in relation to others and to one's past, both personal and collective. In doing this, she helps us see the universal in the particular and the magic amidst the mundane.

Gibbons finds it most pertinent to focus her concerns and interests through women characters and to explore the “phenomenon of being female” and the burdens of women, particularly as wives and mothers, and especially among less affluent women in the South. In doing this she has made good use of her memories of her own experiences and those of her family, as she attempts to give them order and meaning, to understand, control, shape, and accept. She has written in How I Became a Writer: “So I believe that it is under the incredible burden of memory that I write, and I cannot trade my memory, as much as I've often wanted to do so. My past is what it is. All that memory will allow me or any other writer to do is order it through language” (5).

With each of her three novels she has gone further back in time for settings, characters, and other material—into her own past and into the past that impinges on her past. Though the format differs, each book quickly establishes a chronological and developmental position at which the central characters have arrived and then, retrospectively and with a first-person point of view, explores how they arrived at that point, with almost no concern in the particular novel for what might come later than, or because of, its beginning point. It is likely that through research and her imagination she will continue to explore further and further back. In this regard, her fourth novel will really be part two of A Cure for Dreams, bringing that focus even further toward our time. One result of this movement back into the past is a lessening of intensity with each novel, resulting in more clarity and in changes of format and tone as she is forced into even more distance from her material than she has cultivated in her earlier work. Also, with each book she covers more time, as she continues to develop her portrayal of interactions between the old South and the more modern South and their ways and traditions.

Students of Southern writing often point to concerns with place (and land), family (and history), and religion (and sin and guilt) as primary themes or concerns in the body of Southern literature. Gibbons does little with the last, but she certainly emphasizes the other two. With each novel she has become more specific about both time and place as her literary imagination has been accepted and praised and as she has become more comfortable with being a writer and with using material from the locale she came from. Also, books that cover more time require more specificity, for both writer and reader. Most reviewers understood her first two novels to be set in the South, and North Carolina reviewers understood them to be in set in North Carolina; but others mistakenly have written of her settings as “deep South,” “backwoods,” or even Georgia, which is not as likely to happen again.

She has pointed out that all three novels are set in the same “landscape,” and some readers have noticed that some of the characters and places in one novel appear also elsewhere in her fiction, though we see them somewhat differently in each novel or story because of time differences, narrator differences, familial and geographical angle differences in focusing and vantage points, and different emphases—as in the works of William Faulkner, Wendell Berry, and others who write extensively about one particular locale.

One reviewer has suggested that Gibbons intends a series of interlocking novels. Certainly she is mining the rich artistic possibilities of human experience (history, mores, and language) in the rural Nash County, North Carolina, area in which she was raised and near which she lived even after moving into town; and she has found it a fertile and worthy locale for her explorations, which helps with the reality of her details (that ring true to one who knows that area). However, in much less-effective, less-important, and less-developed uses, she does deal briefly with western and coastal North Carolina in A Virtuous Woman, and with Kentucky and Ireland in A Cure for Dreams. She has said that in each of her novels she hopes to convey an accurate impression of a place and time and a respect for their traditions.

Language and voice are important components of Gibbons' art—important to her realistic intentions and her faithfulness to time and place, and important to the effectiveness and success of what she is trying to accomplish in the reader's experience. She wants the reader to sense the worth and uniqueness of the character through that person's distinctive voice, usually as she or he speaks directly to the reader, thus better enabling sharing of feeling. Like James Weldon Johnson, she has chosen to avoid dialect, but to strive for an awareness of idiom characteristic of and appropriate for that particular individual and time and place. This depends more on metaphors, word choice, and syntax than on pronunciation and grammar.

Some of her characters are not formally well educated, but are intelligent, highly aware of their world, and often wise; they are not caricatures, nor condescended to, but are presented with respect. She begins her conceptualization of a work with character and voice, not with plot or abstract ideas. She strives for a direct, concrete experience—not of exaggerated local color, but of regional realism and the universal therein. Through a focus on the area she knows best, she wants to emphasize for the reader not oddities or peculiarities or differences, but universal and eternal verities and some sense of their flavor in that time and place. She uses rural anecdotes and sayings because her characters would use them, to help them understand, control, and go on as these are adapted and applied to current circumstances. They are not clichés, but pregnant and versatile significations from a body of wise tradition and custom, which she respects, parts of a commonly held and available rich treasure trove of shared community experience. One reviewer wrote that she “makes the colloquial compelling.” In her writing, interior experience is more important than surface experience, and language is the important interpretive mechanism for bringing that to the reader, even concerning memories of surface experience.

Gibbons has shown herself to be unafraid of writing from inside characters of various ages, complexities, and backgrounds, male or female, and in varied circumstances and times, many of which she herself has not experienced—and in doing so well and interestingly, and with verisimilitude, insight, and understanding. She is good at using contrast, humor (which she feels is essential), and folk and popular culture, without their being inappropriately intrusive. Each of her novels has been less directly autobiographical than the one before it, and structurally more complex (though quite different in tone) as she has continued to adapt and experiment with a first-person point of view and layerings of structure in her attempt for directness of experience for the reader and the fullness of awareness that comes from multiple focuses and the depth, irony, perspective, counterpoint, and understanding made possible therein—which is how we know and experience life ourselves, not primarily in a linear way.

In Ellen Foster she shifts back and forth between past and present as Ellen speaks to us, using her good present to intersperse assurance, and also to provide relief from her persistently bad past, for author, character, and reader. In A Virtuous Woman she uses disjointed time as Jack speaks to us of his wife, Ruby, who is already dead, and in alternating chapters, as she approaches death, Ruby speaks to us of Jack. In A Cure for Dreams, the layering is more complex but not more difficult, even if one does experience less directness of speech because of the form and tone of the book. In it Gibbons has a contemporary (1989) woman briefly introduce and close the book, in between letting that woman's recently dead mother (1920–89) speak to us directly about her own self and even more so about her own mother (who in italics occasionally speaks for herself) and about her own grandmother and the impact of both of them on her, up to the 1942 birth of the introducer. (Ellen Foster had covered only a little over a year, focusing primarily on one character, and A Virtuous Woman over two and one-half decades, focusing primarily on two characters.)

Such forms require an alert and attentive reader, whose experience is enriched by them. Gibbons has not found the short story to be her genre, saying that she has good ideas for short stories but doesn't find it easy to develop them for that form. The short stories she has published are clearly inferior to her novels and were produced under pressure to do so, the one in The Quarterly a rearranged extracting from Ellen Foster and the other, “The Headache,” a more interesting but flat and somewhat inept story also set in Nash County.

Gibbons is serious about both the art and the craft of writing, though in How I Became a Writer she wrote: “I've never believed anyone can will the mind to create a thing of beauty. I like to think artistic creation starts in a more mysterious place, somewhere deep within, probably somewhere way far back in one's past” (5). In addition to writing fiction, she enjoys reading widely and analyzing and writing about literature. This is evident in her book reviews and in her essay on Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories (where she finds purpose in fiction in some ways not unlike her own purpose). She respects and enjoys, and has been influenced by, a variety of literature from across the ages, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. Clearly, as a writer she also has been influenced by the teaching and editorial advice and encouragement of Louis Rubin; and she plans to follow Welty's example and remain with the South as both residence and primary subject.

She is not a writer who writes according to a rigid daily schedule; she does not force her writing. She writes first for herself and is not very self-conscious or audience-conscious while doing so. She writes with great economy and efficiency of style and with control of her material and no wasting of words, which results in novels that are not long, but are compact, yet fully realized; as one reviewer said, they are “all a novel should be and more than most ever are,” and as another put it, they are “stunning in their power and grace.” This economy of literary means is not a result of her having little to say, but of her having so much to say and with such belief and purpose that she does not wish to lead herself or the reader away from the book's main thrust in any way, resulting in significant accomplishment and no wasted effort for writer or reader, which is but one sign of her well-focused skill.

SURVEY OF CRITICISM

One of the obvious indications of how Gibbons' novels have been received is the awards and editions they have produced. For Ellen Foster she received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. (The Academy's literary awards committee included Irving Howe, Donald Barthelme, James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht, Elizabeth Spencer, and Anne Tyler.) Ellen Foster also received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the Best Books for Young Adults in 1987. In 1988 Ellen Foster was fifth on France's best-seller list, and in 1989 A Virtuous Woman led the Atlanta Journal and Constitution's list of best-sellers in the Southeast. That same year Gibbons received from the National Endowment for the Arts a fellowship to aid her in writing a third novel, and for that work-in-progress she received in 1990 the first PEN/Revson Foundation Fiction Fellowship for a writer 35 years old or younger.

The paperback editions of the first two novels are in Random House's Vintage Contemporaries series (for Ellen Foster Random House outbid Dell, Viking Penguin, and Washington Square), and Paramount optioned the movie rights for Ellen Foster. Editions of both of the first two novels appeared in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. A Virtuous Woman also was published in Denmark. Both of them were both reviewed and discussed with her widely in the United States and abroad, mostly enthusiastically and favorably, in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television, and led to various interviews in both print and nonprint media. (Anyone using the interviews should consult a chronological spread of them because of how her responses to some things changed over time.)

Many reviewers immediately compared 11-year-old Ellen Foster with some other child of fiction, usually also an orphan, created by a well-known writer—for example, Twain's Huck Finn, Cinderella, Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, or J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. That this occurred so often might be seen as demeaning; but upon reading the full reviews, one realizes that this impulse was the result not of a sense of imitation on her part nor even of influence on her, but rather a recognition of Ellen's uniqueness and the book's quality, which let Gibbons seem deserving of consideration alongside such literary predecessors. Most reviewers emphasized Ellen's pluck, perseverance in the face of great and various difficulties, endearing straightforwardness, boldness, wit, spontaneity, resilience, practicality, wisdom, and tough stoicism, along with her coming to grips with friendship with her young black friend, Starletta, and the search for love and familial stability. Generally they found Ellen's voice (the matrix of this first-person narrative) to be matter-of-fact, detached, clear, simple, honest, controlled by the author, convincingly that of a child (even when talking of death, murder, eternity, race, etc.), and, while of course limited in its information, reliable. Unfortunately, several reviewers misinterpreted Ellen's use of “old” when speaking of herself and thought it referred to either or both chronological or experiential age instead of understanding Gibbons' intended use of it as a Southern term of acceptance and endearment (as in: “I like old John there”).

A number of reviewers mentioned how close Ellen Foster comes to melodrama, yet avoids it by focusing not so much on Ellen's multitude of difficulties themselves, but on her resourcefulness and her belief in herself as she deals with these difficulties. They found the result of Ellen's voice and its speaking directly to us, and of Gibbons' focusing, to be a book not sentimental, but human, humorous, and compassionate, with a believable survivor as its heroine. A number mentioned not only the skill of the characterization in the book, but also how this is enhanced by the book's moving back and forth between Ellen's past and present experience, giving the reader a meaningful counterpoint of awareness and perspective, and greatly assisting the possibility for humor even when things are quite grim and desperate—which is often. A few reviewers who also interviewed Gibbons began to see some parallel between her book and her own life, but they did not explore it very far and usually did not deal with it in their reviews, leaving it to comments within the published interviews.

Even before Ellen Foster was published, there was remarkable praise for it, which Algonquin understandably used in its publicity, advertising, and dust jacket for the book. Eudora Welty wrote: “What a marvelous writer she seems to be on almost every page. … A stunning new writer. … The life in it, the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word!” Walker Percy wrote: “It's the real thing. Which is to say: a lovely, breathtaking, sometimes heart-wrenching first novel.” Alfred Kazin wrote: “A captivating, often hilarious mix of Victorian fairy tale and fresh American lingo … [with] the wickedest relatives in literature since King Lear … in a style primitive, saucy, and exhilarating.” Elizabeth Spencer wrote: “Original, compelling, and frighteningly real, the voice of Ellen Foster makes the reader know her story in her own terms. I was absorbed and moved. Kaye Gibbons is a new writer of great force. She knows how to speak to our hearts.” Most reviewers agreed that the author of Ellen Foster was one to watch, and in his review Jonathan Yardley wrote: “a work of considerable subtlety and intellectual sophistication. … a sly, funny book about a sly, funny girl. … Yet it is a mark of Kaye Gibbons' accomplishment that in no way is Ellen a moral or intellectual prodigy; she is simply a good little girl who makes her way out of trouble through the stubborn belief that life can be better than what it's been for her thus far. She is a terrific kid, and Ellen Foster is a terrific book.”

When Gibbons' second novel appeared, readers and reviewers were wondering if she had been able to sustain the level of accomplishment that had been so widely praised for Ellen Foster. Though A Virtuous Woman is in a number of ways quite different from Ellen Foster, most who reviewed it believed that she had produced another successful work and a worthy follower of her first book. The approaches of the reviewers of this second novel seem, however, more varied. Padgett Powell wrote of it in comparison and contrast with Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Wild Palms, emphasizing how “banged up” its characters are, calling it a complex novel, and emphasizing its structure and “balances and counterbalances, symmetries and their neat absence that shore up the book, creating a sturdier vessel. … there is also some ‘moral structure.’” He concluded that the novel is worthy of its interesting characters and its dangerous but somewhat ingenious alternation of first-person point of view chapters, with Ruby talking to us as she approaches death and Jack talking to us after she has died, and together giving us their past, while at first apart and then together. A French reviewer emphasized the book's honesty and integrity, dignity and humility, its themes both simple and deep, its treatment of the daily emotions of the heart. Marilyn Chandler approached the novel in response to its impressive explorations of what love and marriage are and can be, what the relations can be between good and well-intentioned man and woman, which she finds expressed in “a simplicity of language and childlike emotional honesty touching and even gripping” to the readers of today's world. She found a skillful sustaining of tension between the language of the characters and “the depth and magnitude of the feelings and questions they manage to evoke.”

Various reviewers praised the language of A Virtuous Woman, including its images and metaphors, its rural Southern cadences, and the matter-of-fact power in its storytelling, as its two principal characters speak directly to the reader. Several wrote of it as a deceptively simple and quiet book without much action, yet a deep book as it unsentimentally explores how love comes to be and grows, even with pain. An English reviewer said the book has the simplicity of good country music's focusing on the bare bones of life and traditional values, while a Kansas reviewer compared it to “good fiddle music,” and one in Florida wrote of Gibbons' lines as having “the tensile strength of wire; pluck one and it snaps right back.” Some reviewers found the ending of the book, with its noticeable change to omniscient point of view, flawed or weak; others found it strong, necessary, or helpful. Most found the novel's two major characters admirable and very real, persons who learn a lot about life, love, and sorrow, and whom the reader is glad to have met and to have learned from. One said that Gibbons clearly loves her characters for who they are. Often there was an emphasis on the compelling aspect of the narrative and a declaration that this novel, with its wisdom and art, is far above much of what now passes “as fine literature.” Various reviews spoke of grace, joy, decency, gentleness. A North Carolina reviewer called Gibbons an “exceptional writer who relies on the simplest words to convey the deepest emotions and conditions of the human spirit,” and Fredric Koeppel wrote: “The human spirit is a wonderful thing, and it's a rare author who can believably depict its simple grandeur and dignity. That ability is the chief attribute of Kaye Gibbons.”

The reviews of A Cure for Dreams appeared widely and were generally praising, but were not as many or usually as long as those for her first two novels, and as a whole they were more muted. Often reviewers tried to focus on this book in relation to her other two and to try to discern themes, concerns, and intentions in all three together, both comparing and contrasting, and making attempts to deal with what was now clearly a writer with a developing career, no longer just a talented beginner. Of course they focused on plot and characterization, and they also usually particularly noticed form and ambience and how these, in their estimations, were or were not more effective than those in her first two books. Although there were emphases on the three novels together, this book also was allowed integrity of its own. Lee Smith called it “lyrical and lovely, shot through with moments of recognition.” Valerie Sayers compared its structure to easygoing, meandering Sunday rides in the country, “willing to take detours if the landscape looks promising, willing to sit awhile if the vista is curious, willing to backtrack” if something had been missed. She also called attention to “a highly stylized and charming narrative voice, one that mixes 19th-century formality (and chapter headings) with 20th-century directness.” Josephine Humphreys wrote of Gibbons' “delicate hand,” which keeps the distinctive characteristics of her characters from seeming exaggerated. She said that the story's telling is “economical and quick,” with scenes and characters “drawn surely and sharply,” and it “sounds spoken, its language often stranger and stronger than literary language … [its] style both simple and baroque.” For her, “this is a novel of vision and grace. It shines.” Stacey D'Erasmo also called attention to a nineteenth-century aspect in Gibbons' novels, and found the three of them together to be “like a feminist Spoon River Anthology for mothers and daughters, full of methods for surviving, escaping, and outliving brutality.” Most reviewers called attention to the strong, dominant female central characters in this book and in its two predecessors, a focus on the “eternal feminine,” and some to the corresponding weakness of the male characters; but Jerry Mills also stated that it is a book for anyone who “values subtlety and craft and the nuances of feeling that language in skillful hands can evoke. And it is a book for anyone who wants to know what makes the South such fertile literary ground.” Sayers called attention to the language of the book also: “What a good ear Kaye Gibbons has … [taking us] down the back roads … [pointing] out what incredible lives are lived in those ordinary places.” Dannye Romine's Charlotte Observer review concluded: “Four years ago, we knew nothing of Kaye Gibbons. Then boom! This Nash County native swooped down upon us with fearsome talent … giving us music that, in Flaubert's words, will melt the stars.”

Bibliography

Works by Kaye Gibbons

“June Bug.” Carolina Quarterly 38 (Winter 1986): 55.

Ellen Foster. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1987.

“The Headache.” St. Andrews Review 32 (Spring/Summer 1987): 3–8.

“The Proof.” Quarterly 1 (Spring 1987): 60–72.

How I Became a Writer. My Mother, Literature, and a Life Split Neatly into Two Halves. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1988. Without the first five words of this title, the contents of this pamphlet also has appeared in the Leader (November 10, 1988): 22–27; and in The Writer on Her Work, Volume II: New Essays in New Territory, ed. Janet Sternburg, New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

“Planes of Language and Time: The Surface of the Miranda Stories.” Kenyon Review n.s. 10 (Winter 1988): 74–79.

“A Nash County Girl's Tribute.” News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) (November 5, 1989): 5D.

A Virtuous Woman. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1989.

Family Life. Rocky Mount, N.C.: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1990. Three chapters from A Cure for Dreams. “To Be Published by Algonquin Books.” Limited to 500 numbered and signed copies.

A Cure for Dreams. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1991.

Studies of Kaye Gibbons

Bell, Mae Woods. “Writing Is Part of Life for Kaye Gibbons.” Rocky Mount (N.C.) Telegram (April 26, 1987): 41.

Brinson, Linda. “It's OK: Novelist Writes on after a Difficult Revelation.” Winston-Salem Journal (June 18, 1989): H10.

Chandler, Marilyn. “Limited Partnership” (Rev. of A Virtuous Woman). Women's Review of Books 6 (July 1989): 21.

D'Erasmo, Stacey. Rev. of A Cure for Dreams. Voice Literary Supplement (April 1991): 5.

Earle, Ralph. “Vices and Virtues” (Rev. of A Virtuous Woman). Spectator (Raleigh, N.C.) (April 27, 1989): 25.

Fleischer, Leonore. “Is It Art Yet?” Publishers Weekly (May 8, 1987): 34.

Hoffman, Alice. “Shopping for a New Family” (Rev. of Ellen Foster). New York Times Book Review (May 31, 1987): 13.

Humphreys, Josephine. “Within Marriage, A Secret Life,” (Rev. of A Cure for Dreams). Los Angeles Times Book Review (May 19, 1991): 13.

Johnson, Maria C. “Speaking from Experience: At 29, Writer Has Lived Many of Life's Stories.” Greensboro News and Record (August 31, 1989): B1-B2.

“Kaye Gibbons,” 46–50 in Contemporary Literary Yearbook, 1987 vol. 50. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988.

“Kaye Gibbons.” Television interview by William Friday on North Carolina People, University of North Carolina Center for Public Television (July 24, 1989).

Koeppel, Fredric. “Household Labels Rile New Novelist Gibbons.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis) (July 8, 1990): G1—G2.

———. “Novels Feature Southern Setting, Characters without Caricatures” (Rev. of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman). Commercial Appeal (Memphis) (July 8, 1990): G4.

Manuel, John. “Clear Vision: Raleigh Novelist Discusses Fame, Fortune and Her Forthcoming Book.” Spectator (Raleigh, N.C.) (July 19, 1990): 5–6.

Mills, Jerry Leath. “Kaye Gibbons: ‘The Eternal Feminine’ in Fiction” (Rev. of A Cure for Dreams). News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) (March 10, 1991): 5J.

Powell, Padgett. “As Ruby Lay Dying” (Rev. of A Virtuous Woman). New York Times Book Review (April 30, 1989): 12–13.

Romine, Dannye. “Literature Liberates: Raleigh's Kaye Gibbons Finds Freedom, Affirmation in 1st Novel.” Charlotte Observer (April 26, 1987): 1F, 13F.

Rosenheim, Andrew. “Voices of the New South” (Rev. of Ellen Foster). Times Literary Supplement (London) (November 25, 1988): 1306.

Sayers, Valerie. “Back Roads, Strong Women” (Rev. of A Cure for Dreams). Washington Post (April 8, 1991): C3.

Sill, Melanie. “This Perfect Story Has a Happy Ending.” News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) (April 27, 1987): 8A-9A.

Slater, Joyce. “A Virtuous Woman Grabs Reader from Start” (Rev. of A Virtuous Woman). Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 28, 1989): N8.

Tyler, Phyllis. “Kaye Gibbons: ‘To Be a Writer You Have to Eat Literature.’” Independent (Durham, N.C.) (April 23, 1987): 24–25.

Yardley, Jonathan. “Child of Adversity: A Young Heroine Finds Happiness Overcoming Prejudice” (Rev. of Ellen Foster). Washington Post (April 22, 1987): C2.