By Nancy Weber
I love Angela Green. She has heart, she has guts, she should be given her own brick in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Wall of Tolerance. She manifestly feels so much affection for her cast that each and every character is redeemed if not downright beatified by the last page. She brings to mind fellow Southerner Tennessee Williams’s stirring line: “Nothing human disgusts me unless it is unkind.” Actually she goes further, way further. “Hell, I would have believed Hitler if he told me he loved the Jews if I was sleeping with him,” says the homosexual Norm in Another Legacy. From the profoundly decent Norm, the words are actually poignant.
The Legacy centers around four Atlanta ladies in their mid-60s who lunch at their friend Suzanne’s restaurant — their conversation so emotion-laden and raucous that a waitress has named them the Drama Queens and routinely has to offer free dessert to irritated patrons within hearing distance. The lunches are punctuated by scenes in which they follow their separate but linked destines, in the model perfected by Rona Jaffe half a century ago.
Lily, a pediatrician, is dying of breast cancer, but she doesn’t mind because she will soon get to join her late husband, Harry, a gay physician who married her for protective cover yet truly loved her. Overweight, frequently over-wrought Monica owns a paving company with her disagreeable husband, from whom she’s separated; miraculously, she attracts the love and erotic devotion of a gorgeous young stud, who also has the millions needed to save the company. Janet is a bisexual shrink with a bipolar daughter, Vanessa, in jail again as the book opens because the girl prefers street drugs to her prescription meds. Libidinous Suzanne, a realtor, obsesses over her ex-husband. “Any reminder of him made her wet, like the time she discovered his broken bottle of cologne in her suitcase.”
Angela Green is also a realtor. The Q&A in the endpapers tell us that there is something of her in all her characters, although she identifies especially with Suzanne, “looking for love in all the wrong places.” Although she has credits as a journalist from way back, Green started writing book-length fiction in the Medicare years. She embraces astrology, reincarnation, and a gentle metaphysics. Lily’s dead husband, Harry, manifests himself to Lily and his lover, Norm, who overcomes his jealousy to become Lily’s chief caregiver, the one who slips her extra morphine at the end of the game and holds her close as she breathes her last. Then Suzanne, Monica, and Janet are all allowed a glimpse of a gauzy Lily and Harry, holding hands as they evanesce.
Reader, I confess: I cried at the end of The Legacy. I could hardly wait to start Another Legacy. I would rather read Angela Green than Jasper Fforde.
How can I not give her books a rave review? But how can I not caution you against them? I haven’t felt this conflicted since I was sent to review a restaurant where the nicest proprietors in the world served me a chicken so undercooked that it sat in a puddle of bright blood. Didn’t anyone look at the damn plate before it came out of the kitchen?
Mustard Seed Press, which seems to exist only to publish Green, apparently provided no copyediting or proofreading services, though the author’s acknowledgements thank an editor. The comma-conscious will go mad. Nearly every page in these two novels offers a deviation from standard punctuation.
On page 1 of The Legacy: “Already immersed in loud conversation, her friends, Janet, Monica, and Lily had been waiting at their favorite linen-covered round table tucked into a corner.” You don’t need Strunk & White to tell you that either Janet, Monica, and Lily are Suzanne’s only friends, in which case a comma should follow Lily, or they are four of a larger number of friends, in which case no comma should precede Janet. Sometimes commas appear where periods are required. On page 47: Janet broke the silence, “I’m boiling,” as she removed her jacket. “Didn’t sleep all last night,” She winked at Monica, “I almost cancelled since I’m really busy today.”
Green’s efforts to convey Suzanne’s Southern inflection are similarly unhappy-making. “Sorry, Ah’m late … If you smell something burnin’, it’s my feet,” she drawled, and picked up the menu. “Freaking sidewalk’s hot as Ha’des.”
More substantive complaint: Another Legacy is billed as the “first reader interactive novel published,” which is true only if we accept an idiosyncratic definition of both “first” and “interactive.” Book I is dotted with recipes for dishes mentioned at the ladies’ lunches and other meals; in Book 2 some recipes are supplied by readers, who are credited at the end and also appear as minor characters in the story. In the age of books with choose-your-own plot lines, not to mention the collaborations made possible by the Internet, Green’s claim is disingenuous and grandiose — especially her suggestion that inclusion in her series offers readers immortality. Better to stick with Lily’s hard-earned wisdom: A well-lived life is the best legacy.
Readers may also feel miffed that whole sections of The Legacy appear in Another Legacy to supply back story. Notable example: a pages-long scene at a ski resort where Janet’s daughter, Vanessa, endangers another young woman and tells malicious lies about her mother. Fun, but the scene barely carries its weight once.
As for the recipes — oh dear. I don’t want to be New York City snarky, but cranberry marshmallow salad? Brownies that use the godly proportions from Joy of Cooking, then call for the flour to be beaten into the eggs and sugar rather than gently folded? But if you like lemon balm, an ingredient in many of her dishes, you’ll be charmed by Green’s invitation to e-mail her for info on how to find it and grow it.
In similar spirit, she will phone your book club or even try to visit in person. No one can doubt her sincere desire to connect, especially with older women. Her inclusiveness, reflecting the best ethos of the new South, is nothing less than inspiring. And boomers-and-beyonders need her message that living large is the best anodyne.
And yet. And yet. I suddenly think of one of the doyens of etiquette who wrote on the subject of teaching children good manners: “The best heart in the world won’t save your child from embarrassment if he doesn’t know how to eat an artichoke.” (I would welcome interaction with any reader who knows the source of the quotation and the exact wording if I’ve screwed it up.) Well, the best heart in the world doesn’t save a writer from embarrassment if she doesn’t pay attention to her sentences.
“This is a paving company not a legacy,” Monica’s unpleasant husband says to her. “We spread hot stinking asphalt on roads.”
No matter that the Legacy novels are written from heart to heart, not mind to mind. It’s possible to provoke glorious tears while punctuating conventionally. Green promises a Legacy novel per year, unto infinity. As she drives forward down the long and winding road, perhaps in Monica’s cool red dump truck, I hope she detours through Chicago to read the Manual of Style. Otherwise she cheats not only her readers but her own good heart, her genuine gift.
