In a Brick from a few weeks back I referred to a recent novel that had Fort Smith, Arkansas, as one of its main locales. But I hadn’t read but a few pages. It’s time to do the right thing: finish and reflect.
It’s A Secret Word by Jennifer Paddock, 2004, published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It’s 206 pages, not counting six pages of discussion questions and an interview with the author. Apparently we bought a “reading group” edition.
“A Secret Word” is a good little book and a more-than-decent debut novel. Its three female protagonists start out at 15 or 16 then crest 30 by the end. They’re Fort Smith Southside High School buddies, at least Chandler and Sarah are, with Leigh almost a pal. The difference may be personalities, but it’s really that Chandler’s a lawyer’s kid, Sarah’s a doctor’s kid and both families belong to one of the country clubs. Leigh’s a blue-collar kid, fatherless to boot.
If it sounds like three cliches bound for a Lifetime cable TV woman’s movie, it would be but for Paddock’s sensitivity. We see the girls grow up, sever a few family ties, fall in and out of love, and try to make something of themselves. Paddock makes each woman real; if you don’t know people exactly like them, you know people who are close to people like them.
Technically, Paddock goes out on a limb: First-person narrative is tricky enough, but she gives each alternate chapters so it’s three voices, talking about themselves and the others. The author’s skill shows in that I easily could recall which girl had which traits and which problems.
It may be old-fashioned to prefer a single protagonist, but the book would have worked better as Chandler’s story, perhaps in the third person. Paddock favors her: more details and more empathy. Sarah fascinates: how do spoiled girls grow up? Yet Sarah’s at times just sketched in. Leigh’s story of trailer-park hardship is oft-told, but Paddock just misses having enough empathy. So I kept feeling short-shrifted.
What about Fort Smith? It’s why I read the book.
Chandler and Sarah end up in New York. Leigh has no advantages so is stuck in Arkansas. As the ne’er do well, she could be the baseline by which the progress of the others is measured, but Chandler with her level-headedness could be, too. That’s a problem of plural protagonists.
Paddock, as I must correct my comments from May, does more than get the place names right on Fort Smith. She does create Blair Park — I suspect for background later cut as Blair is Sarah’s last name — but it’s almost my beloved Creekmore, a mile from where I was raised. She gets Hardscrabble right, as far as I would know from the few times I visited.
She gets Southside and its surroundings right. Paddock does little with teachers or cliques, as they’re outside the plot. There’s tennis, part of the back story of Chandler and Sarah. Fort Smith still is big on tennis, as it was then, while Fayetteville for example can take it or leave the sport, in parks or clubs. Overall, the basics of this small city in the late 1980s are spot-on, if mainly from the eyes of its professional class.
“A Secret Word” — the title is explained near the end but I still don’t get it — is not about Fort Smith; it’s about the trio of young lives. A novel can’t really be about a place, just the who and what there, can it?
Paddock nailed the who and the what by showing some of the where. Fort Smith is unusually full of inherently kind and well-meaning people; she shows them. The well-off don’t quite fit in but they don’t know that; she demonstrates that. It’s a small city and not a town, a frequent disconnect in literature and movies, and she shows the difference.
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