ARTS THE NORTH TEXAS FIVE

THERE ARE FIVE of them. One works in a hardware store, one teaches at SMU, one is on the staff of the Dallas Times Herald, one writes radio plays for National Public Radio and the BBC. One has small children who keep her occupied.

They can hardly be called a “group,” much less a “school.” And they all scurry from the label of “regionalist.” But taken together these five writers-through their accomplishments as authors of quality novels-are putting the Dallas/Fort Worth area on the literary map.

It is almost easier to define what they are not than what they are. They are not authors of “popular” or “genre” fiction. They are not getting rich writing novels, either; though some books bring in considerably more, even a relatively successful novel may earn less than $10,000 these days, and a serious, quality novel usually represents several years of hard work. Two of the five currently have novels under film option, which may eventually result in considerable financial rewards, but none of them has yet achieved that elusive level of fame and status that enables a novelist to live exclusively from his or her book royalties.

North Texas is home to other novelists, ranging from housewives who churn out bodice-ripping romances while the kids are at school to big names like Richard Condon. But these are the five to watch. Each has produced at least two successful novels, and each has a major work of fiction either in progress, approaching publication, or in the market for a publisher. And their work is clearly quality fiction, with a purpose extending beyond merely making money for the author and publisher.

They vary widely in age, interests, and lifestyles. But, as of 1986, these five are the rising stars on the Dallas area’s fictional horizon.



IN TERMS OF rising high and fast, the shiniest name in the group is Joe Coomer. You can find him on a Saturday afternoon by driving north out of Fort Worth on Highway 199, past a depressing array of rundown shopping strips where cowboy honky-tonks mingle with storefront churches.

When you see the sign that says “Welcome to Springtown,” you’ve gone too for. Ask the lady at the Quickstop if she knows where Crosstie Building Center is, and she’ll direct you back south, past the flea market and the Baptist Church of La Junta. Ask her if she’s heard of Joe Coomer and she’ll search her brain for a moment and say, no, she doesn’t believe she has.

But he’s there anyway, standing behind the counter at Crosstie Building Center: Joe Coomer, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction Award for 1983 and one of America’s most promising young novelists. He peers through round, thick glasses and rings up a sale.

A boyish twenty-seven, Coomer was bom in Fort Worth where his father was stationed at Carswell Air Force Base, but moved around to various points while growing up, finally graduating from high school in Kentucky. Two years as a business major at the University of Kentucky (including one course in creative writing, for which he received a B-rninus) ended when he transferred to SMU as an English major. A set of three stories written as an independent study project somehow grew into a novel. Coomer showed the novel to Bryan Woolley, then book page editor of the Dallas Times Herald, who referred Coomer to his agent. Three weeks later. The Decatur Road had been bought by St. Martin’s/Marek in New York, and one year later, in November 1983, it appeared in bookstores. Coomer’s second novel, Kentucky Love, was published by the same company in July 1985.

It was while he was still a business student that Coomer read Thoreau’s Walden, a book that he admits changed his life and outlook. He learned a few things about writing from Thoreau, too, particularly in the use of the grand metaphor: in The Decatur Road, the journey down a rural highway becomes a symbol of the journey through life, told with a concurrent narrative describing the life of a Kentucky farm family. At the end of the book, in a brilliant Thoreauvian touch, Coomer sweeps these dual strands together in a single, shattering paragraph that embraces not only his character’s life, or one family’s existence, or rural America in the 20th century. In Coomer’s skilled hands, the trials and triumphs of the simple people who live on Decatur Road expand, in ever-widening circles, to encompass the whole of human existence.

And maybe after you wake up, and have cleared the sleep from your eyes, you can add up all the things in the whole world you can count on, like the return of spring, and go from there. Go up the steps of the courthouse maybe, through the long hallway and out the back door, down the alley that joins, somewhat inconspicuously, Highway 69, which goes all the way to the Pacific. Or maybe, as you wrap your coat around you and lean up against an old oak, maybe, you decide, you can just turn around, like the tide and the blood and the ancient dusk, and go back home.

While The Decatur Road has strong nostalgic undertones. Kentucky Love alternates the lively setting of the University of Kentucky campus with the dreamy isolation of the main character’s grandfather’s farm- presumably not too far from Decatur Road. Hart, an eighteen-year-old student, bounces between these two locales, herding cattle with his grandfather, engaging in frat-house pranks with two buddies, cutting classes, and trying without much luck to pick up girls. But his time comes, foreshadowed one day in Ancient History class, when he realizes that “Sometimes in your life, when you don’t expect it and aren’t ready for it, right in the middle of everything, you bump right into somebody.” Of course he bumps into somebody that very day, and falls in love as only a young man can.

If this sounds like raw material for romantic pulp, rest assured that Coomer transforms it into a powerful literary statement, imbued not only with mastery of language and tone, but with the energy and honesty of youth, epitomized in one of the most appealing characters to show up in recent American fiction.

Coomer’s third novel, A Flatiand Fable, is scheduled for publication in April of this year. “The people in New York [at St. Mar-Un’s/Marek] wanted to make a lot of changes in it, so we sent it to Texas Monthly [Press], which liked it the way it was.” Coomer says.

He admits that A Flatland Fable is, for him, a departure both in setting and subject matter. “It’s about one day in the life of a man named Horgan in a small town in West Texas,” he says. “He’s the town’s little league baseball coach, the fireman, and a self-described ’waiter.’ And one day, suddenly, everything he has been waiting for happens to him.”

While readers who have come to love Coomer’s smoothly elegiac treatment of rural Kentucky will have to wait their turn, Coomer’s Texas admirers will at least have a chance to see him apply his considerable skills to a southwestern landscape.



ONLY ONE OTHER writer in this flourishing group is under thirty. Karen Ray, a California native, moved to Arlington with her husband just before the publication of her first novel, The Proposal (Delacorte Press, 1981).

“I deal with contemporary issues,” she says, “and things that I can feel comfortable with. Whatever I write, I want to be able to write with authority.” So far, that area of authority has been the world of upwardly mobile suburbia, peopled by characters who run well-oiled, goal-oriented lives, but who eventually face a moment of crisis. “I’m not interested in writing about someone riding a ferry to work every day” she adds. “I’m interested in writing about what happens to that person when the ferry sinks.”

In The Proposal, the ferry sinks for a young, ambitious, female engineering student when she discovers that, despite her IUD. she is pregnant. The issue of abortion-whether to have one, what it is like-is graphically and honestly covered, but Ray does not allow it to dominate the book. Instead, she focuses (after some gripping description of the abortion) on the issue that really concerns her: how the young woman and her boyfriend react and eventually work out a damaged relationship.

Ray, who holds a degree in economics from the University of California at Davis, takes a frankly anti-intellectual approach to novel writing that is unusual among writers of quality fiction. She confesses that she’s never read more than a page of James or Thackeray, and doesn’t care to read more. She wants her books to be read by many people, not just academics.

“I want first to entertain, to make the reader laugh and cry. Second, I want the reader to be able to look at what I’ve written and be able to say, ’That’s true.’ “

Ray’s second novel, Family Portrait (Delacorte, 1983), is set in the fictitious Dallas suburb of Stockton and involves another ambitious young woman, this time a professional photographer named Susan, who watches the neatly woven fabric of her life unravel as her husband loses his job and her sister initiates an affair with her best friend’s husband. She goes to Latin America to cover an earthquake, only to find an emotional earthquake rocking her own home when she returns. As in The Proposal, the large, external crisis is secondary to the interior crises of the various characters. The shattering events are displayed on an elegantly crafted structure of words.

Like Coomer, Ray struck out for new territory in her third novel, which is still making the rounds of publishing houses. “I don’t like to talk about it,” she says with a smile. “It’s different from the others and may not have the commercial appeal, but I’m still very optimistic about it.”



CONTEMPORARY FAMILY life is also a key issue in the most recent novel by C.W. Smith, The Vestal Virgin Room (Atheneum, 1984). Unlike Ray, whose characters are typical yuppies. Smith has centered this novel on an unusual couple, Dottie and Don. They are musicians playing a mid-winter tour of the heartland, aiming at Vegas and the big time. They’ve already experienced the worst thing that can happen to them- the death of a child-but they haven’t suffered the death of their dreams. Smith carries them down the highway to Vegas, past car wrecks, through two-bit lounges and radio interviews, fueled by high-carbohydrate breakfasts for Dottie, a little speed and a lot of caffeine for Don.

While Karen Ray’s suburbanites always manage to reach a decision about the book’s central issue. Smith’s sub-suburbanites have a compellingly human way of avoiding the finish line. Though Dottie and Don in The Vestal Virgin Room finally accept their failure to reach musical stardom, their marriage falls apart in the process. And, though the reader is not sure just what they will do next, the reader does care.

Smith himself spent some time on the road as a musician, part of a career that included taking a bachelor’s degree in English at North Texas State University, a master’s degree in English at Northern Illinois University, and teaching for a while at a small college in Missouri. To take advantage of the low cost of living, he moved to Mexico, where he finished his first novel, Thin Men of Haddam, in 1973. In the wake of its modest success, he produced a second novel in 1975, Country Music, about a macho Texas teenager coming to grips-none too successfully-with life and love.

As a novelist Smith was silent for the next ten years, though he served as film critic for the Dallas Times Herald for two years before returning to freelance writing and teaching English at SMU.

“AH three of my books have a common train of a protagonist struggling to gain a clearer perception of himself and his place in the world,” Smith says. “I try to deal with the disparity of illusion and reality.”

As of the mid-Eighties, Smith has become one of the more visible writers in Texas. His non-fiction book on the trials of being a divorced parent (based on “Uncle Dad,” an article he wrote for Esquire) is scheduled for publication by Putnam next fall. It will be followed by his fourth novel, currently in progress but already sold to Simon and Schuster for publication in 1987. Tentatively titled Buffalo Nickel, it’s the story of an oil-rich Indian and his adventures in Oklahoma, Los Angeles, and Europe during the early part of the century.



ANOTHER NOVELIST who came to Dallas via the Dallas Times Herald is Bryan Woolley, the senior member of the group in terms of reputation and literary output. Born in Gorman, about ninety-five miles west of Fort Worth, Woolley moved even farther west at the age of eight and spent his formative years in Fort Davis. He entered journalism early, working for the El Paso Times while still a teenager, but gave it up for divinity school at TCU and Harvard. He eventually became an ordained minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Swept up in the turmoil of the Sixties, he returned to journalism, eventually landing in Louisville in 1969. There he produced his first novel, Some Sweet Day. which is currently available in a paperback reprint in Avon’s Southern Writers Series.

“Writing a novel is something just about every journalist wants to do,” he says. “I know dozens of reporters and feature writers who want to write novels, and a few who actually have. And once you do it, you tend to keep doing it.”

In Some Sweet Day and his second novel, Time and Place (reprinted in TCU’s Texas Tradition Series), Woolley draws on his own childhood experiences. In both books, domestic tragedy and alienation reflect a greater tragedy and alienation in the world at large. World War II is just a distant rumor in Some Sweet Day, but the violence of that war comes home when a young father returns physically and psychologically damaged. And in Time and Place, the polio epidemic that swept the country in 1952-53 becomes a personal tragedy when a close friend of the main character contracts the disease. Still, despite frank treatment of brutal subject matter in both of these books, Woolley manages to achieve an almost idyllic tone, presenting even emotionally disturbed characters (such as the father in Some Sweet Day) with warmth and fondness.

Woolley moved back to Texas to work for the Times Herald in 1976, and has since produced two more novels, November 22 and Sam Bass. Like all of Wbolley’s novels, November 22 deals with communal relations and reactions, though in this case the community is Dallas on the day of the assassination of President Kennedy. November 22 is not kind to Dallas; the book is crowded with characters who either enjoy the spectacle of JFK’s assassination or who worry more about the publicity problems the murder has caused for the city than about the event itself. Though some of these characterizations are weak, the journalistic immediacy of November 22 makes the book hard to put down.

If November 22 marked a strong departure from the earlier novels, Sam Bass, written in 1978-79 but not published until 1983, represents yet another direction for Woolley. A fictionalized biography of a famous Texas outlaw of the 1870s. it achieves a mystical, dreamlike tone as it explores that old favorite of novelists, the criminal mentality. Woolley is now at work on a fifth novel, concerning a Dallas murder trial.



AT ABOUT THE same time the legend of Sam Bass was inspiring Woolley, the life and times of the femous female bandit Belle Starr and her daughter Pearl were attracting the attention of Fort Worth author Ann Leaton.

“I had been reading about women in the West and women on the frontier for some time,” she says in a soft, British-sounding accent. “I was interested in the subject in general, and I kept coming across references to Belle Starr’s daughter Pearl. Only a little is actually known about Pearl, but it was a fascinating skeleton. I decided to invent a life for Pearl, using what was already known.”

A native of Cleburne who grew up in Fort Worth and graduated from TCU, Leaton spent almost two decades abroad before returning home in the early Seventies. Her reputation rested largely on the radio plays she wrote for NPR and the BBC before the appearance of her first novel, Good Friends, Just. Published in England but not in the United States, Good Friends, Just was followed by a collection of novellas, Mayakov-sky, My Love, in 1984 (Countryman Press) and Pearl, published by Knopf in 1985.

After Pearl, Leaton’s name should be inextricably linked with her native Southwest. Like Woolley’s Sam Bass, Pearl is a fascinating study of criminal motivations, but with a uniquely female outlook. While Woolley’s male outlaws are in reality brutal but imagine themselves in a heroic light, Leaton’s female outlaws are sometimes tender but have no illusions about themselves. Woolley’s Sam Bass fancies himself a Robin Hood in Reconstruction-era Texas, but Leaton’s Belle Starr and Pearl are simply working women (respectively a horse thief and a prostitute), who have come to terms with what they are.



ALL FIVE OF these North Texas novelists work separately, each producing according to his or her own standards and ambitions. But in spite of their differences, certain common themes come through in their books. Texas, whether in the turmoil of the late 19th century or the incredible prosperity of the Eighties, is a constant setting. And the issues that race contemporary urban Texans-the relationship of individuals within their families and within the larger community-recur.

In a larger sense, these five writers sharewhat all serious writers of fiction, fromChaucer to Dickens to Beckett, have in common. They have taken the truth and filteredit through the glass of fiction. And, filteredthrough that glass, the truth is made morebearable for all of us.