Set in the coastal fishing village of Sanavere, south of Miami, “Familiar Heat” centers around Faye Parry Rios, a young woman cursed with bad luck and blessed with gumption. Kidnapped and raped by bank robbers, then abandoned by her husband, Faye soon loses her entire personality to brain damage in a near-fatal car wreck. Her recovery is heartening but never sentimental–she is good but never too good to be true–because Hood has no use for movie-of-the-week heroics. And while Faye’s dependency is also metaphorical–the horrors and triumphs of how our lives connect is Hood’s great theme–Hood never uses Faye’s naivete for cheap effects.
This is Hood’s first novel, but you’d never know it. The author of two volumes of short stories, including “How Far She Went,” for which she won the Flannery O’Connor Award, this Georgia writer has made the leap to the longer form without ever looking winded. Freed of short fiction’s formal constraints, she exults in the chance to look a character over and dawdle over details. When she writes of one character, “She was in a squandering mood,” Hood could be describing herself.
Casually but indelibly, she can produce a portrait in a paragraph. Auditing the match-making machinations of Senora Rios, a manipulative old horror, she writes, “There is, she mused, as she worked the color through to the ends with her special comb, a fine cosmetic line between valiant and pitiful. She wanted a look that blended both. . . . She filled in her outlined lips with care and bright color. Not with her usual straight-across Zorro strokes, but patiently, a tender, full-court Gioconda smile, as bright as the roses in her shawl.” This girding for battle ends with “There she sat, all black and red. A storm warning on a perfectly clear day.”
Hood writes about these characters with a kind of poetic chattiness, like one of those small-town citizens who knows everything about everyone. But she is no scold, and though none of her characters fools her for a minute, she lets her readers do the judging. Over the long course of “Familiar Heat,” she proves to be a guide to trust, a friendly witness to life and a narrator so persuasive that it’s all you can do to remember that she’s made the whole thing up.
