LARK AND TERMITE [Hardcover]

In a time when fiction seems to be lost amid memoirs and non-fiction, and chick-lit, this is a refreshing read. Crisp, magical, satisfyingly psychological - this novel spans great distances and time periods to effectively reveal a deeper message. The prose is rich and beautiful, but doesn't outshine the wonderful characters. Set in West Virginia and Korea, Lark and Termite is full of rich symbolism, character, and most of all - story. Surely, Lark and Termite is for the savvy reader - although this isn't to say this novel shouldn't be taken to the beach, or on a plane, and read leisurely (as I did). This is a well paced read with big pay-off, and will be sure to please those seeking a great literary escape. Phillips captures another time and place, and does so with conviction. I'd imagine this will be one of the best offerings of the year and will be up for some major awards. Five stars, easily.

Three-quarters of the way through Jayne Anne Phillips' poetic novel, I acknowledged the beauty of her prose but wondered if there'd be a payoff. An hour or so later, *Lark and Termite* had become a page-turner that reduced me to tears.
Like *Machine Dreams,* the novel of a quarter-century ago that made Phillips a literary sensation, *Lark and Termite* tells about a family from the inside, from multiple perspectives.
There's the husband, a soldier implicated in the massacre at No Gun Ri, the Korean War's precursor to Vietnam's My Lai; his wife, an older woman who was attracted to how well Bobby Leavitt blew his trumpet in smoky jazz clubs; her sister, slaving as a waitress in a small-town diner and caring for the two title characters.
Lark -- 17, self-reliant, sexually awakening -- is typing her way through secretarial school with a determined look on her face. She's completely devoted to her 9-year-old brother. Termite is "a boy in a deep wagon, eyes hard to the side and head tilted, fingers up and moving ... [who] hums in a quiet tonal code that stops and starts." He's "in himself," Lark says, "like a termite's in a wall."
For Termite was born with hydrocephalus, and small-town Appalachia in 1959 wasn't especially well equipped to serve a special-needs child (though Phillips, typically, turns even bureaucracy into magic, transforming a social services worker into an otherworldly symbol).
By crafting parallels between events at two railroad tunnels separated by nine years and geography (one in Korea, one in West Virginia), Phillips' novel suggests unexplained glimmers of a spiritual world hovering above our own. But she roots her mysticism in reality, as in this description of what it's like to drift toward death: "Abruptly, a shutter falls. Sounds diminish and recede. What and why does it matter. Like an invited guest, he pulls deep inside, poured through himself like water." Just as Termite's limitations aren't complete -- he hears preternaturally well -- Phillips clearly regards death as a transition, not an ending.
Her novels appear only once every several years. *Lark and Termite,* a tragedy and a masterpiece, has been worth the wait. Read it, savor it.

Thirty years along in a literary career with a modest-sized body of work to her credit, it's fair to ask whether Jayne Anne Phillips has fully realized the potential displayed in her dazzling 1979 debut short story collection, BLACK TICKETS. With the publication of her latest novel, her first in nine years, there is a good chance she will silence any doubters and will leave all of us hungering for more of her distinctive voice.

LARK AND TERMITE is a family drama set in the 1950s in an unlikely pairing of locations --- a dying West Virginia town and a battlefield in the early days of the Korean War. The novel is built upon four interconnected points of view: 17-year-old Lark, attending secretarial school in the town of Winfield and sensing the pull of the wider world; her disabled "minimally hydrocephalic" nine-year-old brother Termite, whose stream of consciousness pours onto the page in a voiceless swirl of images and sounds; their Aunt Nonie, who has been left to care for both children after they're deposited with her by her younger sister, Lola, a sometimes lounge singer who is irresistibly attractive to men and disastrously incapable of dealing with the consequences of that fact; and Corporal Robert Leavitt, Termite's father, a jazz musician and young soldier from Philadelphia whose platoon accompanies South Korean villagers fleeing the North Korean onslaught.

Basing the grimly realistic Korean segments of the novel on accounts of the massacre of South Korean civilians by American troops at No Gun Ri, Phillips movingly describes the last days of Leavitt, mortally wounded by friendly fire and pinned down in an abandoned railroad tunnel, where he has sought refuge to escape strafing from North Korean aircraft. He is sustained by memories of the few months he spent with Lola before shipping off to war and is tenderly cared for by a Korean girl with a blind brother in her charge. "If death is this brilliant slide," he thinks in language that is characteristic of Phillips's lustrous prose, "this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad."

As Robert lies dying, Lola is about to give birth to Termite in a Kentucky hospital. And it's that juxtaposition, only one of several such almost mystical connections (the parallel between Lark and Termite and the unnamed Korean siblings another), that gives the novel its identity. Phillips compresses the story into four days --- July 26th, 27th, 28th and 31st --- recounting events that occurred on those dates in 1950 Korea and 1959 West Virginia. That structural choice reveals a central metaphor, as Phillips repeatedly but effectively invokes the idea of mirror images. Describing Lola, she writes, "She realized little by little, and learned early to mirror back what people wanted to see." Or this, in Lark's description of how she believes the inexpressible way Termite sees the world differs from that of normal people: "That's the point: he's got a rhyme and reason. We only see the surface, like when you look at a river and all you see is a reflection of the sky."

Phillips enfolds Lark and her brother in an intricate web of relationships. Aunt Nonie works at a local restaurant and occasionally shares the bed of her boss, Charlie. The Tucci family lives next door, stoking a persistent and frank sexual tension between Lark and one of the Tucci boys, Solly, who plays a pivotal role when Lark and Termite are driven to the attic of their house by the waters of a flood whose drama consumes much of the novel's final act. There's a solicitous, if mysterious, social services worker named Robert Stamble and Ervin Tompkins, one of Leavitt's comrades, whose cameo roles bringing gifts to Termite and Lark lend emotional shading to the story. But at the core of the novel is a tale of filial love of the fiercest kind, and while Phillips would never be so naïve as to suggest her protagonists have overcome the challenges life has placed before them, it seems Aunt Nonie speaks for her when she observes, "The wash of the old stories is gone. We're all going somewhere else now, somewhere different from where we've been."

In a recent interview, Phillips said, "Fiction is the slow apprehension of meaning through the elements of story and language." It's that perspective that gives her the patience to weave this meticulously constructed tale notable both for the lyrical precision of its prose and the resonance of its storytelling.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

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