Volume 47, Number 17 · November 2, 2000
Pilgrim's Progress
By Joyce Carol Oates
Cherry
by Mary Karr
Viking, 276 pp., $24.95
My memory of eight surreal months in Beaumont, Texas, in 1961-1962, overlapping minimally with the time span chronicled by Mary Karr in The Liars' Club (1995) and in her new sequel to that best-selling memoir, Cherry, is almost exclusively visceral. When the air is saturated with chemical smells—sickly sweet, acrid, like toxic-waste cherry syrup with a nasty undertone of sandpaper—you find it difficult to contemplate loftier subjects. Airborne pollution from oil refineries in this devastated East Texas landscape near the Louisiana border and north of the Gulf of Mexico, known without irony as the 'Golden Triangle' (Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange), must have been close to the edge of human endurance; yet the area's sense of itself was unfailingly upbeat, optimistic.
Review, 3467 words
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