Customer Reviews

Coffee Rings: Three Women, One Tragic Event, Nineteen Years Later, Secrets Surface...

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved "Coffee Rings" so much that it was, in fact, probably my favorite book that I have ever read, and it was a story that inspired me to write one of my own along the same lines. This one was just a nice suspense story, without all of the disgusting twistedness of so many other suspense novels. To me, this story was worth considering "suspense," because of the "secret" which is alluded to throughout the book. Reading the way the "secret" was hidden, and the reader was given vague foreshadows, taught me how to write. I've since tried to find another story like "Coffee Rings," but this one has proven to be so good it's unique. Not many stories really draw me to them the way this one did.

COFFEE RINGS is a detective story. Eunice Hogan, soon to die of cancer, takes up for the last time the mystery of why and how 19 years earlier her daughter Dove drowned on the North Carolina coast while swimming with three girl friends. Dove had left a note before driving off during a college break. At the scene of the tragedy Eunice had also found part of her daughter's bathing suit. The police crime report and autopsy differed from the excuses given by the three surviving girls, especially champion swimmer Annette Billings. But Eunice had declined to pursue these clues. And the three girls never volunteered a word. Eunice, facing certain death, is determined to know the truth and persuades the three friends, now adults, Annette, Ruby and Lara to return with her to the beach for a final accounting.

COFFEE RINGS is also passionate and graphic. Made into a best-selling movie it would be rated R for explicit sex, nudity, violence and suicides. Lehman's characters, like those of the three Bronte sisters, are vexing mixtures of insight and obtuseness and of good and evil; in some people the evil is more insidious and ineradicable than in your ordinary American neighborhood. There are no heroes.

COFFEE RINGS is also unabashedly religious and explicitly, argumentatively, even defensively theological.

Very long for an Yvonne Lehman novel, COFFEE RINGS focuses on a handful of people; and almost all of them belong to one local unnamed evangelical Protestant church. The principal characters (one the minister of that church) are attached by habit and sometimes by deep conviction to their religious community and allocate both themselves and one another into that community's strikingly narrow neo-Calvinist pigeonholes. That church does not, for instance, appear to think often or deeply about baptism or eucharist. And remarriage after divorce is presented offhandedly as if every Christian's right. The church's major "sacrament" seems to be bible-reading of self-selected texts alone or with others. Some characters are sure that they can find a Scriptural passage to enlighten or even explain every concrete happening in their lives. Theirs is a religion in which a belief in election, fate and doom interact unpredictably with free will and Scripture.

At one level this novel is explicitly didactic: designed to spark discussion of its contents within like-minded church groups. Witness its postscript "DISCUSSION THOUGHTS," with questions (but no answers) for each of the book's 34 chapters. Samples: "Must one reveal one's past to the person one plans to marry?" "Does your church speak out against abortion? Does it offer an alternative?" "Eunice has kept the coroner's report secret from her husband for nineteen years. Is that right?" "Should you reveal something that eases your conscience but hurts another?" "Is it hypocritical to behave like you're morally upright after you've had an affair?" "Is withholding the truth the same as lying?" "Are you able to tell other people how they can be sure they will go to heaven when they die?"

To a reader who is Christian but not an evangelical Protestant, the many good deeds, hymns and prayers of the church community described have the ring of authenticity. The theology, however, does not seem nuanced enough to bear all the burdens routinely unloaded upon it by the novel's characters. Either the church's imparted wisdom is received by rote and barely internalized, or, more frighteningly, church teaching guides the believer into relieved personal self-satisfaction that there is no necessary connection between evil deeds and ineligibility for election to salvation and heaven. Each person judges his own righteousness on the basis of Scriptural texts and assigns the verdict to God.

Not all readers of COFFEE RINGS will be closely allied mentally and spiritually to the novel's little mountain Carolina church community. Readers from other denominations or non-evangelical faiths might charitably hope that a kindly God has paradoxically led these honest searchers into what seems a temporary theological strait jacket -- but only en route toward a framework more spirit-filled and internally consistent. It might seem unlikely to many readers that Providence intends the people of COFFEE RINGS to remain so self-contentedly cramped much longer. For experience suggests that human freedom and human destiny cry out for a universal gospel with larger lungs for breathing.

-OOO-

Don't get me wrong, the writing is very good, especially the middle part (about 100 pages). However, I HATE it when an author jerks me around, thus the loss in stars.

The book is 300 pages long. The first 118 pages are actually the middle of the story and refer melodramatically to some vague but horrible, terrible, life-shattering event that happened 19 years ago. The pastor's wife keeps thinking about a mysterious letter and pressing a 'green item' to her chest when thinking about that past. You expect that 'green item' to be something really astonishing and profound, yet two-thirds of the way into the book, we finally find out it's simply the swimsuit bottom of a two-piece suit.

Hiding the 'big event' does nothing for the story. It only left me frustrated with having vague clues as to what was going on when all the characters knew exactly what was going on. The reader is deliberately left to wonder. If the book had started at the beginning, at the accident as seen by the nineteen year old girls, then worked forward through the confession, the new information learned, and the resolution, I would have given the story 4.5 stars.

The last half star is removed because of the Shelby character in the first half of the story. The motivation for her acting like a snotty brat at age 25 is not really established ahead of time, but just sprung on us. She's never seen as a nice person before hand, either, so we have to take the author's word for it that there's some reason we should want to spend our precious time reading about a character you want to shake some sense into (if not just strangle on the spot).

So that others don't have to go through the fustration of the first third of this book, here are some of the details about the big event: Four college girls go to the beach by themselves for a vacation. They grab some forbidden beer, get drunk, and decide to go skinny-dipping. While swimming, one girl drowns and even CPR can't save her. They call 911, hide the beer, and dress the body and themselves in swimming suits, but the wrong swimsuit bottom is put on the body. (Thus, the significance of the green swimsuit bottom to the girl's mother, the pastor's wife.) The girls are Christians, so they hide that they were drunk and skinny-dipping. (In fact, that 'horrible' secret seems to eat at them more than the fact their friend died on them.) The letter the pastor's wife has is a letter from her daughter left right before she went off swimming and died. It holds a clue as to why things played out the way they did, but neither side (the three girls or the mother) has been talking so no one knows the full truth. The rest of the mystery, I'll leave for you to find out.