A World Gone Madcap

MOONPIES AND MOVIE STARS

By Amy Wallen

Viking. 308 pp. $23.95

Igrew up around Southern women. They had names like Betty Lou and Jeannie Mae and Lavonne, and while they had outgoing personalities, I must now conclude they were lacking in color. They never, to the best of my knowledge, wore bowling shoes to go swimming, nor did they throw parties to celebrate the weddings of soap-opera characters. They never put on ostrich-hide cowboy boots or wore their hair black with thick white skunk stripes on each side. More grievously, they never told me they were "madder than a Hereford with a twisted gut" or "madder than a bluetick dog with a rattler in its pen" or "more prickled than trying to take a rubber band off a barrel cactus."

In short, they were nothing at all like the madcap Texas gals of Amy Wallen's novel "MoonPies and Movie Stars" (or, come to think of it, any of the other females who bestride the Fried-Green-Ya-Ya genre), women so thickly daubed with Southern color they grow positively monochromatic before your very eyes.

Let's be grateful, then, that Wallen has given us at least one Dixie chick with gray in her hair. Name of Ruby Kinkaid. Lives in Devine, Tex., where the drought's so bad that even the wind snaps and cracks when it blows. Ruby runs the bowling alley, and the work's not too bad, except when you have to chase rattlesnakes out of the pinsetter rooms. Husband's dead and buried, and grown daughter Violet's been missing these four years. Left behind a pair of young ones, too, including a boy who's taking his anger out on roadkill.

And then, what do you know? Violet turns up -- frolicking across the TV screen in a commercial for ButterMaid. Vowing to bring her daughter back home, Ruby climbs into a Winnebago and steels herself for the long trip to California.

"How long you reckon you'll be gone?" asks Earl, Ruby's bowling-alley swain.

"Long as it takes."

At which point "Earl's gray eyes got a little watery. Silence hung in between his nods. He looped one thumb through the belt loop by his Lone Star belt buckle. 'Reckon it's best to follow the trail until you can't follow it no more.' "

This being a comedy, Ruby's got plenty of trail mates. This being a comedy, they are no help at all. Certainly not Ruby's trampy sister, Loralva, who's too busy trying to get on "The Price Is Right," or that awful Imogene, Violet's mother-in-law, who wants some Hollywood magic to rub off on her, too. With Ruby's grandkids along for the ride, they all end up in darkest Hollywood, a place "where anything could happen," where even the bougainvillea's dangerous. But Ruby knows how to handle rattlesnakes. And somehow, through a cloud of strippers and wannabes and Bob Barker worshipers, she homes in on her quarry.

"MoonPies and Movie Stars" is Wallen's first novel, and there's a rigorous tenderness in her portrait of a good woman who persists, against all reason, in expecting goodness from others. Ruby goes to Hollywood to find the kind of storybook ending that's found, well, only in Hollywood, and Wallen is so tuned in to the tensions of this journey that you wish she had provided some flesh-and-blood company.

Instead, Ruby keeps knocking up against Janey One Notes like Loralva, whose scorched-crotch antics can be mapped from her first entrance, and Imogene, whose evilness knows no abatement, even when someone undertakes the public service of clobbering her. I would have cheered the clobberer myself if I'd believed in Imogene for a second -- and if Wallen didn't keep prodding us into angles of superiority on her characters, who broadcast their white-trash dimness with every other utterance.

Even Ruby, when she's not floundering in water beds, is flashing us a taffy, TV-warped brain. When someone suggests she enlist the local actors' union in her search, her response (verbatim, I'm afraid) is: "Why would the union want to help me find my Violet? They can't even find Jimmy Hoffa." To quote Ruby's favorite show: "Heehaw." Or maybe the better program to invoke is "The Beverly Hillbillies," which spun endless variations on roughly the same city-mouse/country-mouse premise. With this crucial difference: The Clampetts were intended as foils to the patronizing sophisticates around them. Whereas Ruby, musing on an illuminated Rand McNally globe, becomes her own rebuke: "It sure would look sharp next to her new velour Barcalounger. She'd look like one of them intellectuals." In fact, that passage could only have been written by one of them intellectuals. Amy Wallen may nominally be on the side of Ruby and Devine, Tex., and all they represent, but in moments like this, the book's true author could be Ruby's wayward daughter, climbing out of that Texas dust and pulling the ladder up after her.