Word: ephesus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ENTERING EPHESUS, by Daphne Athas. Genteel poverty in the South, growing pains, jinks (both high and low) for three teen-age sisters and their slightly ante-bellum family-circa...
...Bishops with their three daughters arrive in Ephesus, a tiny college town in the South. They are destitute, and despite the war boom that is about to start, they stay that way, thanks to father's "ruthlessness about the unimportance of money." What the Bishops do have plenty of is "Bishopry" -an elusive but tensile esprit that makes them feel different, not to say unique...
...Entering Ephesus is about being adolescent in that family, and the author manages to make most practitioners in the crowded coming-of-age field seem calculating and niggardly indeed. This is not one of those tightly written, masterly constructed narratives of one watershed season when "Everything Changed." It is an ungainly, exhilarating chronicle of five years in which things changed and changed and changed...
...prettiest daughter, Irene. Most of the novel is devoted to Urie, who is 13 when the book begins; she is an avowed bluestocking blessed with ambition and "a thick ego." Then there is Sylvia, 11, a charming but unfathomable sprite who is called "Loco Poco." Shortly after arriving in Ephesus, Urie forms an intense friendship with an ignorant but brilliant local boy named Zebulon Walley, whose ego is diaphanous and who attaches himself to the Bishops like a starving kitten...
...Ephesus is over 400 pages long and contains no fewer than 55 chapters full of encounters, imbroglios, plots. Not all of them work, and occasionally the pace slackens. The author is vulnerable to charges of excess and lack of critical judgment. One may as well try to defend reality. The only rejoinder is how vivid and how much like life the book is. The late Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." This is a novel. · Martha Duffy