NECESSARY LIES

A bleak tale tinged with humor, but sometimes bordering on caricature, of a poor, pregnant girl in the South. It is 1953, and pregnant 11th-grader Cliffie doesn't want to tell her father, who has a bad heart, and who will surely be angry since he has warned both her and her sister Mary Helen to stay away from the father, Roy Harris. What Cliffie knows about sex and men and being a teenager she has culled primarily from magazines: ``She learned that it was typical to be pouty. She fell in love with being typical, vowed she would always be. In love, too.'' Cliffie's blankness is useful, since her naive thoughts can sustain double entendres (``Sleeping with somebody tells a lot,'' she thinks at one point—referring to her sister, not her lover), but it also makes her a rather unconvincing character. She confides her predicament to the family's preacher, Brother Leroy, and when her father asks, ``Who messed you up, gal?'' she directs him to Brother Leroy, whom most of the townspeople soon suspect of being responsible. Daugharty (Going Through the Change, p. 790) infuses all of this with irony, but after a while she seems to be laughing at her characters rather than with them, as when Cliffie exacts revenge on the spiteful Mary Helen by wiping herself in the outhouse with the page from the Sears & Roebuck catalogue where her sister had marked a pair of black ballerina shoes she wanted. Mary Helen too has been messing around with Roy Harris and plans to leave town with him, but before either of the sisters can get her way, tragedy erupts. Although it relies on more than one clichÇ about the American South, the novel's ending is clever. It seems rushed, however, especially since it's the most interesting and active part of the book. Problematic, but perhaps a necessary stage in the development of an interesting young writer.