TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 8/11/97: Space Is The Place: The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra John F. Zwed Nonfiction 8/08/97: The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism Edited by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda Nonfiction 8/07/97: Blind Pursuit Matthew F. Jones Fiction 8/06/97: Smell: The Secret Seducer Piet Vroon Nonfiction 8/05/97: The Death and Life of Bobby Z Don Winslow Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: California demon By Gary Kamiya Denis Johnson's "Already Dead" is the strangest novel of the year . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

____ U - N - R - A - V - E - L - L - I - N - G ________________ By Elizabeth Graver +++ HYPERION · 298 PAGES _________ FICTION BY SALLY ECKHOFF | when Melville likened "Moby Dick" to "the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers," he was really referring to the substance of America as he saw it. And while not every writer wants their images crafted out of such stern stuff, some materials do make more interesting reading than others. That said, why do women keep trying to put their stories together with fabric and thread? That's what Elizabeth Graver does in this soft, murmuring novel about a 19th century girl who flees her hearth and family for the lure of the Massachusetts textile mills. "Unravelling" is beautifully written and unusual, but it's so painstakingly embroidered and introspective that it could convince a more robust female reader to take up arc welding. The difficulties of barely industrialized existence furnish much of the color here, but the subtext of this tale is the heroine's messed-up relationship with her mother. It's no surprise that things in Aimee Slater's life come to such an unlovely pass when Graver has saddled the poor girl with such modern sentiments. Aimee doesn't cotton much to religion and feels entitled to explore her sexuality where and when she wants to. Her decision to move to Lynn mimics your average ambitious college girl's flight to the canyons of Manhattan. Mom was not any more pleased then than she is now. Mill work -- spinning and weaving -- provides handy metaphors for fraying human connections, especially when the dithering characters seem so literally wrapped up in themselves. "When I look back," Aimee ruminates, "I picture the journey marked by a long trail of white thread ... It begins in my mother's hand, and then it trails down the road and through the town and out by the field and into the next town, and on and on until the city, and still it does not stop." Aimee snaps the filament herself when she takes up with a fellow factory worker, who naturally gets her pregnant -- with twins, yet -- and takes off. Graver might have been aiming for a view of "An American Tragedy" from the distaff side, but "Unravelling" lacks the scope of Theodore Dreiser's wrenching explorations of the division between how people feel and what they do. Then again, maybe what she wanted to do was to depict perennial female agonies in a time and place that would set off their vitality. In either case, she makes the same mistake: Women's lives are only smaller if we make them that way, and the part of the world we ignore to our peril may very well be that little fragment we left at home. Aug. 12, 1997 Sally Eckhoff, a painter and writer living in upstate New York, is a regular contributor to Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html