The Problem With Murmur Lee
By Connie May Fowler (Doubleday, 304 pp., $21.95)
The author appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 6 p.m. Jan. 26
Lately, I've been missing Murmur Lee. The title character in Connie May Fowler's latest novel, The Problem With Murmur Lee, she's become more than just another eccentric Southern female protagonist for me. With the showcasing of "high-strung" and quirky women characters de rigueur among Southern writers—think Steel Magnolias or Crimes of the Heart—this is an honorable feat. Fowler has achieved that most difficult of literary ambitions: she's made her character real.
A "child of lost Florida," of "swamps and piney woods and cypress hammocks," Murmur Lee is strong-willed and loyal, the type of young woman who loses her faith only to become the most spiritual of us all, conjuring lotions and spells for the lovelorn, the sick and the ailing. People in her small community of Iris Haven (a place just off the coast of Florida) are drawn to her, and for good reason: She is sharp-eyed and irreverent, passionate, a woman who takes on the world in order to wring every last bit of beauty she can from it. In a letter to her best friend, she writes, "Last night's sunset turned out to be a rare breed of awesome. The magnolia leaves quivered in the waning light. The river glowed. The sky bloomed.... It was enough to make my heart break and put itself back together out of sheer joy: lilac, purple, orange, and sage."
When it's discovered that Murmur Lee has mysteriously drowned, her friends are not only heartbroken but determined to uncover the truth behind her disappearance. Until they do, her soul drifts across the earth through time and space, and it's these postmortem wanderings coupled with the musings of her close friends that make Fowler's novel so completely engaging. There's the lonely widowed doctor who secretly loved her, the former marine turned transsexual who leaned on her for support, the best friend gone off up North who returns home because of her. Each one is brave and earnest and in some way devastated by Murmur's death, yet also somehow strengthened by it as well. As Fowler shows, no one is ever truly alone: we are all irrevocably connected to each other and to our pasts.
Fowler's previous novels include Remembering Blue (Doubleday, 2000) and Before Women Had Wings (Putnam, 1996), a Southern Book Critics Circle Award winner turned Emmy-winning "Oprah Winfrey Presents" television movie. It's no surprise then that The Problem With Murmur Lee is as good as it is. Never sentimental, highly original, it's a treatise on love and death, on how sorrow can turn into hope and hope into action. With language that is both languid and energized and characters who are not only self-aware but endearingly unique, Fowler's writing vibrates with good storytelling. More importantly, she shows how one life and one character—whether "real" or not—can leave an impression that is lasting and hauntingly truthful.
