Clarence, MN: Mansfield University

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 1/6/02

Sharp truths found where past, present intermingle
by Carlin Romano

On the lab wall of one empirically minded Mansfield U. neurology professor - a specialist in slicing up rat noggins to pin the physical location of memory - visitors confront a poster with a large photo of a brain.

The caption says it all: GRAY MATTERS.

Elsewhere in the "Phy-Bye" building, as students call it, humanistic psych professor Bennie Singer understands that too, in a less clinical way. Lecturing for the umpteenth time to his undergraduate Personality class, he explains that Freud believed "we set up screens in front of our past. We replace traumatic events with slips of the tongue, confabulated memories - all to prevent anxiety."

"Forgetfulness is not a design," Bennie tells them, conscious that he increasingly can't remember facts, while his 8-year-old daughter Sophie gaily memorizes lists of Greek gods, Great Lakes and first ladies. "It is natural, and may even be biologically positive. Perhaps the mind's ability to make the past malleable is essential to our survival."

The expert on that thought, judging by this warm, playful and magical first novel, is Anne Ursu, a former arts journalist and chain-bookstore minion who lives in Mountain View, Calif. Taking Mansfield and the town of Clarence, its half-college, half-factory Midwestern setting, as her template, Ursu turns Proustian novelistic ambition on its ear.

You want madeleines and cascades of memory, she seems to taunt, in her jaunty but never too wiseguy narrative voice?

OK, I'll give you madeleines.

The premise is mischievously simple, perched at the crossroad of credibility and fancy to sustain the "What-if?" tone her conceit requires.

It's a perfectly normal day in Clarence, best captured in the cafe of the new Davis and Dean superstore: single-father Bennie is having his Friday-afternoon bookstore date with Sophie; Susannah Korbet, in her mid-20s, ponders whether she was right to move to Clarence to be with graduate-student fiance, Todd Lewis; counter clerk Lilith can't wait to hit the "Mythology" section again. Then the civil defense sirens go off.

Harris Jones, the giant psychopharmaceutical plant whose rank odor permeates the town, has sprung a leak (though everyone keeps referring to it as a "spill," to Todd's annoyance). Deletrium is wafting through the downtown. For the moment, company and town officials ask residents to stay indoors as they test the air and try to assess the danger.

Within a few days, they issue an all-clear. "There's no danger," officials confidently announce. Clarence goes back to work. But then personality changes begin to emerge.

At the Sunny Shadows Estates Elegant Living Retirement Community, Bennie's still-spry novelist mother, Madeline (Note to Ursu: change that name in the next edition), tingles at the prospect of a budding romance with World War II veteran Calvin, who never talks about his experiences. But the model community of emeritus professors and well-adjusted retirees appears to turn troubled overnight. Susannah, whose beau Todd is a hardcore rationalist grad student in Memory Studies, finds it harder and harder to escape thoughts of her mother, whose condition forms a wedge between her and Todd.

Perhaps most shaken of all is Bennie, 39, for whom Sophie is the most important person in the world. Lizzie, Sophie's mother, remains, in the cold lexicon of Sophie's teachers, "out of the picture." Ursu lets the reader know why in due time - an awful tale in which one second, one wrong decision, made all the difference for a lifetime.

For years, Bennie, too, has managed to keep the details "out of the picture." Not anymore. Tactile memories flood in. The cherry-wood smell of Lizzie's hair. Her voice. Those last words: "Right or left?"

Ursu impressively keeps the story of Clarence's encounter with its past marching on four generational levels: Sophie's, Susannah's, Bennie's and Madeline's. Slowly, charmingly, painfully, Spilling Clarence unfolds dimensions of how our pasts and presents intermingle, how our dreams and memories feed off one another. No scalpel can touch the truths Ursu locates, from "the specific kind of hope that comes before love," to an old man's worry "about how dry and rough his lips must be, how wiry his hair is, how aged and desiccated his face must feel when held against the hand's memory of another face."

Yet Spilling Clarence is a novel, not a psychology thesis. Ursu entertains as she educates by fulfilling the three principles of novelistic realism: notice, notice, notice, then say it new (OK, four.) As crisis hits, Susannah, tired of Dean and Davis' ubiquitous franchise-to-franchise corporate aroma, wonders if there's "a small town with a factory that makes bookstore smell."

When Bennie loses his composure before his class, Ursu freezes the moment precisely: "Almost all the students have put down their pens and are staring blankly at him. They have been well-trained through a lifetime in the American educational system to recognize what will not be on the test."

Some first novels read like homework exercises assigned by an aesthetic ideologue. Reel off 33 sentences in a row without a passive verb! Pack so much "inventiveness" into your first chapter that the assaulted reader yells "Uncle!" or "Genius!" Insist on the brilliance of your private vision regardless of whether any normal page-turner could share the precious sensibility.

Other first novels flow as naturally as a mountain rapid, splashing you enough to drive home the certainty that there's much more to come - insights that make sense, issues and instincts real enough to demand that you stay alert.

"Counter vague ideas with sharp images," director Jean-Luc Godard urged artists. Anne Ursu counters vague longings with sharp afterimages. When Harris Jones reopens its plant, officials assure one and all that the deletrium spill will have "no permanent effects." You can't say the same about Spilling Clarence, which lingers.

	US Weekly "Best of the Week" "This whimsical, bittersweet debut suggests that the stories of our lives are what save us." The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers "a thought-provoking and timely tale, liberally seasoned with charm and good humor. (Winter 2002 Selection)" The Philadelphia Inqirer "No scalpel can touch the truths Ursu locates" USA Today "Reading their stories is better than eavesdropping on a patient's tale to his analyst." New Orleans Times-Picayune "Ursu does a wonderful job in this imaginative and charming novel." The Library Journal "Ursu is a writer who cares deeply about her characters" Bookreporter.com "this book leaves you chuckling, grinning, tearful, thoughtful, warmed, chilled and, not surprisingly, reminiscent... a brilliant first novel." TheBookHaven.net "an impressive first novel. Anne Ursu has a gift for telling tales. Hopefully, this talent will be utilized for many novels to come." MostlyFiction.com "...the success of the book is not only the stories that she finds to tell but also the way she writes about them." StoryCircle.org "Like many good writers, Ursu draws us into her setting - the fictional town of Clarence, Minnesota - by getting the details just right."
		CLARENCE, MINNESOTA THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER 1/6/02 Sharp truths found where past, present intermingle by Carlin Romano On the lab wall of one empirically minded Mansfield U. neurology professor - a specialist in slicing up rat noggins to pin the physical location of memory - visitors confront a poster with a large photo of a brain. The caption says it all: GRAY MATTERS. Elsewhere in the "Phy-Bye" building, as students call it, humanistic psych professor Bennie Singer understands that too, in a less clinical way. Lecturing for the umpteenth time to his undergraduate Personality class, he explains that Freud believed "we set up screens in front of our past. We replace traumatic events with slips of the tongue, confabulated memories - all to prevent anxiety." "Forgetfulness is not a design," Bennie tells them, conscious that he increasingly can't remember facts, while his 8-year-old daughter Sophie gaily memorizes lists of Greek gods, Great Lakes and first ladies. "It is natural, and may even be biologically positive. Perhaps the mind's ability to make the past malleable is essential to our survival." The expert on that thought, judging by this warm, playful and magical first novel, is Anne Ursu, a former arts journalist and chain-bookstore minion who lives in Mountain View, Calif. Taking Mansfield and the town of Clarence, its half-college, half-factory Midwestern setting, as her template, Ursu turns Proustian novelistic ambition on its ear. You want madeleines and cascades of memory, she seems to taunt, in her jaunty but never too wiseguy narrative voice? OK, I'll give you madeleines. The premise is mischievously simple, perched at the crossroad of credibility and fancy to sustain the "What-if?" tone her conceit requires. It's a perfectly normal day in Clarence, best captured in the cafe of the new Davis and Dean superstore: single-father Bennie is having his Friday-afternoon bookstore date with Sophie; Susannah Korbet, in her mid-20s, ponders whether she was right to move to Clarence to be with graduate-student fiance, Todd Lewis; counter clerk Lilith can't wait to hit the "Mythology" section again. Then the civil defense sirens go off. Harris Jones, the giant psychopharmaceutical plant whose rank odor permeates the town, has sprung a leak (though everyone keeps referring to it as a "spill," to Todd's annoyance). Deletrium is wafting through the downtown. For the moment, company and town officials ask residents to stay indoors as they test the air and try to assess the danger. Within a few days, they issue an all-clear. "There's no danger," officials confidently announce. Clarence goes back to work. But then personality changes begin to emerge. At the Sunny Shadows Estates Elegant Living Retirement Community, Bennie's still-spry novelist mother, Madeline (Note to Ursu: change that name in the next edition), tingles at the prospect of a budding romance with World War II veteran Calvin, who never talks about his experiences. But the model community of emeritus professors and well-adjusted retirees appears to turn troubled overnight. Susannah, whose beau Todd is a hardcore rationalist grad student in Memory Studies, finds it harder and harder to escape thoughts of her mother, whose condition forms a wedge between her and Todd. Perhaps most shaken of all is Bennie, 39, for whom Sophie is the most important person in the world. Lizzie, Sophie's mother, remains, in the cold lexicon of Sophie's teachers, "out of the picture." Ursu lets the reader know why in due time - an awful tale in which one second, one wrong decision, made all the difference for a lifetime. For years, Bennie, too, has managed to keep the details "out of the picture." Not anymore. Tactile memories flood in. The cherry-wood smell of Lizzie's hair. Her voice. Those last words: "Right or left?" Ursu impressively keeps the story of Clarence's encounter with its past marching on four generational levels: Sophie's, Susannah's, Bennie's and Madeline's. Slowly, charmingly, painfully, Spilling Clarence unfolds dimensions of how our pasts and presents intermingle, how our dreams and memories feed off one another. No scalpel can touch the truths Ursu locates, from "the specific kind of hope that comes before love," to an old man's worry "about how dry and rough his lips must be, how wiry his hair is, how aged and desiccated his face must feel when held against the hand's memory of another face." Yet Spilling Clarence is a novel, not a psychology thesis. Ursu entertains as she educates by fulfilling the three principles of novelistic realism: notice, notice, notice, then say it new (OK, four.) As crisis hits, Susannah, tired of Dean and Davis' ubiquitous franchise-to-franchise corporate aroma, wonders if there's "a small town with a factory that makes bookstore smell." When Bennie loses his composure before his class, Ursu freezes the moment precisely: "Almost all the students have put down their pens and are staring blankly at him. They have been well-trained through a lifetime in the American educational system to recognize what will not be on the test." Some first novels read like homework exercises assigned by an aesthetic ideologue. Reel off 33 sentences in a row without a passive verb! Pack so much "inventiveness" into your first chapter that the assaulted reader yells "Uncle!" or "Genius!" Insist on the brilliance of your private vision regardless of whether any normal page-turner could share the precious sensibility. Other first novels flow as naturally as a mountain rapid, splashing you enough to drive home the certainty that there's much more to come - insights that make sense, issues and instincts real enough to demand that you stay alert. "Counter vague ideas with sharp images," director Jean-Luc Godard urged artists. Anne Ursu counters vague longings with sharp afterimages. When Harris Jones reopens its plant, officials assure one and all that the deletrium spill will have "no permanent effects." You can't say the same about Spilling Clarence, which lingers.