This Side of Eternity. - Review - book review

This Side of Eternity by Rosalyn McMillan Free Press, $24.00, ISBN 0-684-86288-3

We've heard so much about Dr. Martin Luther King's last days in Memphis, but so little about that city's everyday black folks and how their lives and activities fed the events that brought him to the city in the first place. The location of Dr. King's last activist campaign and his 1968 murder serves as the backdrop for This Side of Eternity, a fictionalized account of a working-class family that loses its main bread-winner in a pivotal work accident that galvanizes Memphis's black sanitation workers to rise up and demand respect, safer working conditions and a living wage.

Though novelist Rosalyn McMillan hasn't approached the blockbuster sales and mainstream visibility of her sister Terry, she has won a significant audience of her own with three previous novels. Never having read her work before, I was drawn to her fourth novel because of its ambitious theme and locale. I inferred from its dedication that McMillan had drawn her inspiration and perspective from very rich and untapped sources: "This book is dedicated to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, and the two deceased sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker" So I loved the possibilities of her premise.

I was disappointed. When the Baptist church deacon, union man and sanitation worker Walter Russell, along with a co-worker, is crushed to death by a defective garbage truck, his oldest daughter Mae continues to run the household that occupies their shambling North Memphis frame house, just as she has since her mother's death in childbirth. But she also runs the streets at night with other women's husbands. Meanwhile, not only is her 13-year-old sister Anne in her charge, but also the three small orphaned kids of a brother who had been killed along with his wife in a car accident eight months before. Another brother, Kirk, had already left high school for a job in the sanitation department to help support the family when his nieces and nephew came to live with them. Soon he is drowning his depression and daily drudgery in alcohol.

Anne, her niece Bentley and their beloved dependent Nikkie (two years older than Bentley, but handicapped with Down's syndrome) are our heroines. Their brother flees from their dysfunctional family to the Army as soon as he is old enough to enlist. But Anne, still in high school, hangs in there, committing herself to becoming a crusading journalist. Artistically talented Bentley follows her into the newspaper world when she hits upon an idea for an original cartoon strip. What complicates the life journeys of these two women are both more and less than traumatic social changes: They endure jumbled soap-opera plot turns of abuse, disappointing love affairs, betrayed alliances and one very evil white woman. Anne's journalism career gets sidetracked when the little girl from the North Memphis `hood actually marries her boss, the owner of Memphis' major daily newspaper. This development allows readers an extended peek into the real estate, interior home design and social preferences favored by the Memphis elite, however, McMillan's portrayal of these sometimes strike me as ludicrous. For example, the black elite in Memphis, like elsewhere, have yet to penetrate ownership in mainstream media interests.

Graphic sex scenes that might fit a range of prurient tastes--from brutal and abusive to soft-focus and romantic (including a dash of interracial coupling)--seem almost obligatory. Catastrophic illnesses are also thrown in for good measure. Memphis' history and changing demographics over the last 35 years has apparently been meticulously researched, but it is ever so clumsily tossed into the mix. I might compare Rosalyn McMillan to a Jacqueline Susann writing about people who lived in the shadows of the Civil Rights Movement instead of the fringes of show business. But Suzanne's characters possess an authenticity and raw drive utterly lacking in McMillan's.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group