Two chapters into this now and I would say that Taylor paints with a thin brush. By this I mean that his characters, which I’m taking to be the most important focus of the novel, are being revealed so slowly, so meticulously painted in detail, and all via interaction over events that are relatively minor–or at least common to most family dynamics.
The move from Nashville to Memphis has of course been the first major upheaval in their lives and would obviously effect change in each character’s handling of the sudden tearing up of roots. The impetus, the falling out between the father and his legal client, Shackleford, is placed at the heart of the story and yet, the details of this, of what actually happened (theft? loyalty? dishonor? lies?) are not given at all. So the spotlight then falls on the move and its impact on the individuals.
The narrator was around thirteen at the time, had an older brother (who was killed in the war, though I’m not sure exactly at what point of the story), a loving, nurturing mother, a busy but loving father, and two older sisters. The oldest sister, Betsy, was blonde and outgoing, and engaged. The younger, Josephine, was dark-haired and though beautiful, was more intimidated by her older sister’s popularity and lacked confidence.
The changes start almost immediately, before the physical abandoning of the family home. The mother warns the children of their father’s fragile mental state over what has happened to necessitate the move, so that if the name “Mr. Lewis Shackleford” is never to be mentioned, then we find ourselves a bit anxious and disappointed that we, the reader, may never find out the truth–and we were so close!
Betsy’s engagement appears to be in no danger of not transcending the physical distance between her and her fiancee, but we see a new development in the father during the caravan of cars’ ride between Nashville and Memphis. Betsy’s fiancee is along for the ride, and at a stop at a diner, Betsy and he go off to sit at a table where they’ve spotted some friends. Then, they make a decision to lag behind the family to spend a tad more time with these friends. The father takes this as an affront, as we see that having lost his business, perhaps his pride, and his roots, he pulls his family in closer to him as his last sense of grounding and authority. He immediately starts putting doubts in Betsy’s head about her fiancee and does create a friction that causes them to break up.
Josephine on the other hand has felt as a flop in Nashville, bad luck and circumstances and following in the tracks of a much more gregarious and comely older sister, so that Memphis, to her, holds hope of a new beginning, maybe even a second debut into society which might afford her a better chance at finding a beau. And it does–even without the debut–however, their is an unexplainable resentment built up against her not by her sister, but by her mother and her father at her ease in settling into their new environment. Her honesty at being displaced is offset by their stiff upper lipped handling prior to the move, and now they likely are growing weary of the act.
Despite this, the father is more successful in Memphis than he’d ever been in Nashville–that should make him happy. And the mother has become more of a social butterfly in her new surroundings.
What I find interesting is that Peter Taylor has managed to give us these subtle personality changes via little, almost meaningless vignettes of events, progressing the story to build the characters and (likely) eventually round them out completely by the time we get back to the phone call many years later that will bring them all together again.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology