`Strong For Potatoes’ a worthwhile read

STRONG FOR POTATOES, by Cynthia Thayer, St. Martin’s Griffin, 248 pages, paperback, $12.95.

An acquaintance in the coastal Maine village where I lived a few years ago once remarked that if he stood on the sidewalk and tossed a pebble in the air, it was bound to hit a self-styled writer on the way down.

To be sure, we all seem to know at least one out-of-stater who has moved to coastal Maine to live closer to nature and to become an author — but who has succeeded only in doing the first.

New York-born and Nova Scotia-raised Gouldsboro resident Cynthia Thayer, however, is an exception. She and her husband, Bill, farm organically on their Darthia Farm, and her first novel, “Strong For Potatoes,” published last year in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press, is now out in a handsome new paperback edition from St. Martin’s Griffin.

“Strong For Potatoes” describes the self-discovery of Blue Willoughby, a young girl growing up in (surprise!) a coastal Maine community. Scarred emotionally by the loss of a fatally deformed twin sister days after their birth, then scarred physically by an early childhood accident, she struggles for years with a sense of something missing, as if she “didn’t fit anywhere.”

Her three-quarters-Passamaquoddy grandfather provides love and security while Blue’s superficial, self-absorbed mother and weak, ineffective father drift apart. The traditional craft of basket making that Blue learns on visits to her grandfather’s Passamaquoddy reservation home gives her a focus and a means of self-expression, and provides the novel’s title.

The physical setting of “Strong For Potatoes” evokes the beautiful natural landscape in which the author lives and works, and the book’s details resonate with careful research into diverse fields, from Passamaquoddy language, customs and crafts to profound birth defects. Events that are moving or disturbing — human and animal death, sex, birth, a child’s struggle with physical therapy — become even more powerful because of the direct, matter-of-fact language in which they’re described.

It is the same matter-of-factness, however, that makes Thayer’s book, while powerful and interesting, often unsatisfying. Even as we appreciate the interplay of universal themes we’re distanced, straining to hear the voice of a real person talking about real events in a way that will make those themes affect us. Instead of believable people, “Strong For Potatoes” is populated by two-dimensional paradigms, from noble American Indians to Blue’s predictably ditzy blonde real-estate-agent mother.

And instead of eliciting empathy for the loss, guilt, grief, fear and passion of her characters as individuals, Thayer’s novel plays on our pre-programmed responses by combining these sketchy folk with hot-button situations — physical disability, unprotected teen sex, single motherhood, lesbian pride, racial prejudice. There’s little suspense to make us agonize over what will happen next (somehow we already know), laugh in relief, or weep in commiseration.

Lest we miss our cues as to what we’re supposed to be feeling, heavy-handed symbolism points the way. Blue’s nagging sense of incompletion is underscored by periodic reminders that her childhood accident has left her with only one eye. Even her name is only half a name; her dead twin (who, in Blue’s lonely imagination, becomes a perverted version of the imaginary playmate many children invent) was named Berry. We know her father can’t deal directly with life because he inserts a camera between himself and everything that’s happening — even his wife’s infidelity. And so on.

In spite of its frustrations, however, “Strong For Potatoes” is a worthwhile read. Thayer’s almost stolid, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sentences can fall flat as dialogue, but they pile detail upon detail to give her writing a vivid sensuality that pervades every scene, from a childbirth to the processing of ash strips for basket making. (In fact, her ability to convey the physical world without flinching may be a turnoff for readers who don’t care for explicit descriptions of sex or suicide.)

The American Indian themes and pervasive sense of landscape in Thayer’s first novel have led some reviewers to compare her to other contemporary Amercian writers with a strong geographic and ethnic orientation, such as Barbara Kingsolver. But “Strong For Potatoes” suggests Thayer’s voice will be quite strong enough to be heard on its own terms.