"Beware the Moores of England," Jim Glass writes in his notebook, bored stiff while listening to his history teacher describe the English landscape and weather. At the start of The Blue Star Jim is a 17-year-old high school senior. He has things other than schoolwork on his mind. He sits in class transfixed by the long hair of Chrissie Steppe as that hair cascades onto his history textbook. In the beguilingly crisp and unfettered language of Tony Earley, that hair conjures thoughts of "a small, glossy animal curled and napping in the sun."
Jim reaches out for Chrissie, but only furtively. Though she is sitting right in front of him in Aliceville, North Carolina, she might as well be half a world away. The time is late 1941. Chrissie is engaged to Bucky Bucklaw, who is in the Navy and has lately written home from Pearl Harbor. Bucky tells Jim to stay away from Chrissie.
And in the quaintly rural, microcosmic setting that Earley introduced so magically in his 2000 novel, Jim the Boy, Bucky's family money, military status and bullying nature (he was "the kind of baseball player who blamed his glove when he booted a ground ball, or his bat when he struck out") mean that Bucky holds the upper hand.
Jim the boy could have remained a boy forever. Earley's crystalline portrait of him as a 10-year-old brought up by a tenderly protective family ("he ain't no bigger than a poot," said one of his three uncles, who served as the earlier book's Greek chorus) needed no expansion or improvement. But here is a second, cloudier installment, and it brings Jim into contact with a new set of realities. Jim's adolescent joys (secretly fishtailing the family car on country roads), urges (his crush on Chrissie is full-fledged first love) and fears (The Blue Star is infused with signs of the coming war) are much more fateful and painful than the emotions he experienced before.
Though Earley's style remains endearingly airborne, The Blue Star is in substance heavier than its predecessor. Earley's disarming folksiness is intact, but the portents of his story are dark. Jim feels this shift as he senses that his real life is about to begin. He knows he has reached an age to make irrevocable choices. But for the moment, in the teenage time capsule that is The Blue Star, the future is only foreshadowing. Jim lives in a beautifully evoked state of suspended animation.
As he did before, Earley populates Jim's world with only a few bold, well-chosen characters. Each serves a distinct narrative purpose. For all Jim's dreams of life with Chrissie, there is an alternate vision of his future with the less alluring Norma, who plans to be a math teacher and once expected to attach herself to Jim permanently. Norma wasn't one to miss that hair business in the history classroom.
Even after Jim breaks up with Norma, she and Jim's mother are still at work on what was meant to be the nuptial quilt. ("You were just dating," one of Jim's uncles chides. "Norma was picking.")
The seeming plainness of The Blue Star is resonant enough to connect the neat, repetitive rows of the quilt's schoolhouse design with the bleak mill town to which one of Jim's high school friends, Dennis Deane, finds himself consigned. Dennis' seemingly harmless flirtation with a 14-year-old schoolmate has saddled him with a pregnant wife and a dead-end mill job. The mill's production of "miles and miles" of khaki twill for Army uniforms is one more harbinger that Jim cannot miss.
In a book that takes its title from the banner that signifies a family member's active military duty, all these characters face the call of war. And their worries go back a generation. Earley weaves his story's strands a bit too tidily when he presents a thwarted romance between Jim's Uncle Zeno and Chrissie's mother, a romance that ended because Zeno didn't enlist to fight in World War I.
Just as riskily, Earley courts excess sentimentality in a strenuously sweet encounter between Jim and Chrissie in an empty house. With mountaintop clouds on cue to supply an air of fantasy, they imagine themselves as the old married couple who once lived in this place. It is a dream meant to carry Jim through the hard times, and perhaps a sequel.
In a display of his own characteristic magic, which is a sure antidote to heavy-handedness, Earley has the two schoolmates choose fantasy names for this role-playing game. Chrissie decides to call herself Hernando. That makes sense with the memory that Hernando comes from one of the history lessons (on Hernando de Soto) through which Chrissie and Jim have been tacitly flirting.
Giving herself an exotic, ethnic name in Aliceville is also Chrissie's defiant way of flaunting her half-Cherokee origins, which arouse the small-mindedness of this small town's population. When Jim awkwardly refers to Chrissie as "half white," she angrily replies, "That depends on whether or not somebody's asking me to mop."
As The Blue Star evokes the economic forces that shape the lives of Aliceville's residents, it shows Chrissie striking a hard bargain. She has promised herself to Bucky because she sees no other way out of stark poverty. Jim is forced to face this when he finds Chrissie living with Bucky's parents. And he collides with even tougher truths when Bucky comes home in a terrible way. In a book that keeps its symbolism strong and succinct, nothing could better signify that childhood is over.
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