Synopsis
Lady of Spain is about love in the 1950s, when the solution to failed marriage was separate bedrooms and teenage sex was a furtive activity; when everybody - old and young - slow danced to romantic ballads played on the accordion. "Lady of Spain, I adore you..."
The dancers are Bill and Billy Haynes, father and son, both spinning in the orbit of their Lady of Spain, Mrs. Haynes. Billy describes her: "Have I said that my mother was a beautiful woman? She was. I found this somewhat of an embarrassment, another instance of how my family was not right. Mothers were supposed to be plump and gray, slightly younger versions of grandmothers, but mine was trim and dark, with auburn hair and hazel eyes that flashed brilliantly. Around the house during the summer she wore shorts and high-heeled wedge sandals, usually with a halter top..."
Bill is a compulsive philanderer. And Billy is at a sexual crossroads. By the end of their story, Bill has lost his Lady of Spain and Billy has traded her in for the girl who took his eagerly offered virginity. Billy's sexual coming-of-age is complicated by acute and persistent memories: of sales trips taken with his father and the visits they paid to ladies; of his mother's insistence that Billy play his accordion for her "patients" at a Veterans' Hospital party; of muffled quarrels and crying from the bedroom in the family's vacation cabin; of the feel of a satin gown against a boy's body and lipstick on his lips; of the inside of a DeSoto, front seat and back; of nakedness on the floor of a shoe store basement.
Lady of Spain, unabashedly confronts the force of male sexuality, its obsessive grip, its complexity, its pain, its joy, and its music.
Reviews
Set in Oklahoma City, this lyrical, often witty novel explores a somewhat mundane 1950s boyhood. Vaguely interrelated episodes in protagonist Bill Haynes's life form the narrative, reflecting the way still-lucid recollections bind together our own hazy childhood memories. Affected by the contagious disillusionment of his unhappy parents, Billy poetically muses on his unremarkable middle-class world; Taylor captures his quintessentially adolescent attitudes in suitably grandiose yet playful prose. When introduced to jazz, Bill tires of playing such nostalgic odes as "Lady of Spain" on his accordion and takes up the clarinet, reasoning that "one's own breath coursed through it, not air sucked in through a bellows." During his stint at a shoe store, he takes part in erotically charged rituals with female customers and rival salesmen ("I eased a satin slipper onto a girl's small and sleek foot. . . and conjured up a vision of some dark-eyed redeeming angel"). Taylor's ( Loving Belle Starr ) graceful treatment of a young man's coming-of-age, though far from extraordinary, reminds readers of unrequited early crushes, first sips of whiskey and startling glimpses of adulthood.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Taylor (The Lost Sister, 1989, etc.) tells the 1950's saga of a philandering Oklahoma father and the coming-of-age of his son--in nine interconnected stories that deal mostly with male sexuality and offer an incident-filled evocation of two archetypal lives. Bill Haynes is the father, Billy his son. Bill is a salesman (in his prime he sells high-school class rings, then, in his decline, textbooks) and, by his own account, an artist whose talent was ``compromised...before it could properly be developed.'' In ``The Girl I Left Behind Me'' and ``Dark Eyes,'' told from Bill's point of view, Taylor dramatizes a bleak life in dust-bowl Oklahoma: ``I have worked all my life. I have lost everything, a wife to another man, a job through no fault of my own, my son and daughters gone off to their own lives, and I've scratched my way back more than once.'' In the next six stories, told from son Billy's perspective, the family takes a vacation (``Sentimental Journey'') that is at first idyllic, then obsessive and argumentative; the parents separate; the father remarries twice and takes to hard drink (``Lady of Spain'') while Billy motor-scooters about town and, like his father, practices the accordion; ``The Tennessee Waltz'' not only introduces the clan (Texas, Tennessee) but also begins the sexual initiation of Billy that is consummated in the novella-length ``Golden Slippers,'' in which Billy, a shoe salesman (``the shoe is emblem and anthem of human folly''), meets Vernagene. In the final piece, ``Sweet Hour of Prayer,'' Billy attempts (in part through meditation) to come to terms with his father's collapse. The title story appeared in both the O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories in 1987. Like that piece, the collection--managing by turns to be both gritty and lyrical--is a memorable one. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In this poetic coming-of-age story from the 1950s Midwest, Bill Haynes has turned his artistic talent for drawing into a career of designing and selling high school rings. Meanwhile, his son Billy develops a musical ear by playing the accordion, eventually finding his way into jazz. ("Lady of Spain," which his mother loves, is the tune he masters so well.) During his accordion years, Billy's mother, who is caught in a dissolving marriage, makes him her confidant. She creeps into his room at night, lies on the lower bunk, and lulls him to sleep with whispered dreams of how her life could be. But Billy finds his own life through an awakening sexuality. Katie, his high school sweetheart, helps him grow in his music, but it is Vernagene who sweeps him from stale existence to a rebellious infatuation that climaxes disappointingly in a shoestore basement. Through such letdowns, Billy comes to understand his father's own betrayal of his artistic talent. Pleasant, but not as powerful a narrative as it could have been.
- Brack Stovall, Carrollton P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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