LARK AND TERMITE: Jane Ann Phillips

This popular novel is set in a small town in West Virgina, a family of lower middle class origins, with the Aunt, a waitress, taking care of her younger sisters two children, Lark, 14 years old, and her younger handicapped brother, Termite, around five, who is not yet able to walk. The story is told through three or four points of view, often retelling the same events through Larks, the Aunts, and finally Termite's point of view. Much of the story tells about how Lark and Termite end up living with their Aunt. One voice that gives the story a male voice is the young Jewish Jazz musician, who falls in love with Lark's mother, then goes off to Korea to fight. We are allowed inside his head, in small doses, throughout the novel, as he tells his story, mostly of his love for his pregnant wife(with Termite), the madness of war, as the Americans flee the North Koreans, and his eventual wounding, a result of trying to save a Korean child. He dies about the same time his son is born. The story mostly revolves around Lark's growing up, wondering about her background, a flood that threatens their home, her gradual awareness of her past, her mother, her father, and the end, where she, Termite, and her next door neighbor boy friend, hop a freight train and head south to Florida, to her mother's house. I found the soldiers reveries a bit boring after a while, especially when you knew he would die. And I did not much like Termites limited perspective, as she tried to get inside the head of a mentally deficient child. Lark and her Aunt's chapters were the most interesting, as we really see what it is like to live in poverty, to depend on earnings from a waitress, and to live in a squalid shack on a flood plane. Despite it all, the people were all touchingly human, except for the diner's owner, a shrewish old women, who fittingly dies, struggling to take back the watch her son gave to Lark's Aunt. She felt that Charlie deserved someone of a higher class. The flood seems to be the main trouble, other than the family mess(by the way, Lark's mother kills herself, after finding our her husband is dead, and making sure her baby boy will be taken care of). Not a lot of optimism in the story but Lark's setting out for Florida leaves one with some hope; maybe she's learned from her family, and will have a decent start in life.