Word: godwine
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...Gail Godwin's 10th novel, Evensong (Ballantine; 405 pages; $25), is set in the very near future indeed, specifically the waning weeks of 1999. Millennial fever has reached even the idyllic and remote Smoky Mountain town of High Balsam, N.C. (winter pop. 1,000), where Margaret Bonner, 33, serves as rector of All Saints Episcopal Church. "Winter in the Great Smokies would shortly be upon us," Margaret says at the outset of her tale, "the winter that would see us into the next century and the new millennium. Other things were on their way to us as well, things...
...this were not a Gail Godwin novel, the reader's answer might be a rapid affirmative. For Margaret does display some narrative traits that seem to demand an ironic double take. She has the habit, for example, of quoting everyone else's fulsome praise of her: "Oh, Margaret, what a great, great story... You say such wise things, Margaret...You're an extraordinary young woman, Margaret." Isn't Margaret a wee bit full of herself? And what to make of this rector's loving inventories of the riches of her church, "the Elsa Van Wyck Memorial Ciborium with...
...Godwin shows no interest in undercutting or exposing her heroine-narrator. The author has accomplished something more difficult than ridicule; she has created a character who has enough flaws to satisfy contemporary skeptics but who also struggles convincingly with the old-fashioned task of being a good person. For all its leisurely pace, Evensong turns out, near the end, to have wasted few words. It concludes with an Epilogue, set further in the future than its opening chapter, that not only ties up loose ends but also dares to be, in these uncertain times, optimistic...
...folks like Falwell called far right when they're always out in left field? And why does anyone take these bozos so seriously? Maybe Falwell is jealous because the Teletubbies' creators make piles of money without having to threaten anybody with the jaws of hell. CHARLES GODWIN Davenport, Iowa...
Repeated attempts to reach Godwin by The Crimson were unsuccessful...