When Angels Rest (Stay More)

During World War II, real news is a rare commodity in the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. But twelve-year-old Dawny - inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle - finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. Dawny reports on the war between the 'Allies' and the 'Axis'; two roving bands of boys and girls fighting with sticks and spears, competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts. But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home: the crackle of the town's first radio delivers frightening news from the outside world to the isolated village, and a native son dies on Iwo Jima. For the first time ever, an airplane darkens the skies over Stay More, and soldiers occupy the remote hills in training for an invasion of Japan. As the ways of outsiders creep into the small town's routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed.

For decades, novelist Donald Harington has been assembling a piecemeal epic of the Ozarks. Most of the installments have revolved around the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas--a backwoods flyspeck that, like the genuine hamlets the author chronicled in Let Us Build Us a City, seems almost surreally removed from the American mainstream. And most of these books, including the superb Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, are supremely funny and observant fictions.

Both of these adjectives apply to When Angels Rest, which is Harington's equivalent of the Iliad, circa 1942. The narrator, 12-year-old Dawny, is an avid participant in an ongoing set of war games. "There were the top dogs," he tells us, "led by fat Burl Coe until he got drafted and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior ... and there were the underdogs, who did not chose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default." In addition to being a foot soldier, Dawny is also an aspiring Ernie Pyle, who cranks out The Stay Morning Star entirely under his own steam. His narrative of this scaled-down war, and of the doings of his fellow Stay Morons, is as memorable as it is amusing. True, Harrington's energy seems to flag in the latter half of the book, when actual, gun-toting GIs are parachuted into the Ozarks for maneuvers--the last thing these characters need is an injection of reality. But When Angels Rest remains a touching, highly textured fable of childhood's end, narrated in an Arkansan twang that is the author's finest invention. --Bob Brandeis