BOOK REVIEW : JEWEL by Bret Lott; Pocket Books, $20; 358 pages : ‘Jewel’: A Diamond Without the Rough

“Jewel” is a homage to the strength of the female spirit and a reverential act of filial piety.

The dedication reads: “For the true Jewel, Myrtis Jewel Purvis Lott.” Although there is the usual disclaimer (“This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously”), accompanying material with this novel suggests otherwise.

This appears to be the story of Bret Lott’s grandmother and of the heroic attention she paid to one of his aunts who may have been born with Down’s syndrome. The grandmother sacrificed her life--and, to some extent--those of her other children, so that the afflicted one could attain the brightest life possible.

For years, Lott has had the uncanny ability both to see into the lives of the American working class and to see the magic there as well.

In “The Man Who Owned Vermont” a young husband stuck in the unending nightmare of being a Royal Crown Cola salesman gets up at night--anxious and strung out--to make himself a sandwich. A sandwich! A simple sandwich! But all of us, unless we are metaphorically or literally blind, have access to the shining textures of mustard, salami, tomatoes, lettuce. Every one of us is indescribably rich. Every one of us, at some level can “own Vermont.”

Lott is one of the most important and imaginative writers in America today. His eye for detail is unparalleled; his vision-- where he looks--is like no one else’s in this country. Because of that, it just kills me to say that I don’t believe in his main character; I don’t believe his “Jewel.”

Jewel is born in 1904 in the Deep South and goes through some believable hard times. Her well-born mother, who has run off with a half-breed Choctaw, perishes. Jewel’s rich and cruel grandmother, Miss Sissy, and the timid black girl, Cathedral--a child Jewel’s own age who can’t look back at her--seem equally well drawn. The details, the ways of living, are spotlessly plausible and touching.

But the reader never finds out exactly why Miss Sissy sends Jewel to reform school. That’s because Jewel, for the 80 years that she lives in these pages, is never going to get to do anything wrong. She’s a wonderful woman and she’s stuck with it.

So when Jewel meets kind, handsome, green-eyed Leston, who dreams of owning his own lumber yard, and they have five children (by my count) over a period of 18 years and Jewel wakes up every morning counting her children and counting her blessings, I have some trouble believing it.

We tend to see people as “saints” in real life: It’s convenient for us to perceive them that way so that we can go on in our comparatively sinful mode knowing that the saint, walking behind the elephants in the human parade, will clean up the mess for us.

But literature should get inside the minds of these saints, and Jewel, toward the end of this narrative, should function like something more than a human abacus cheerfully toting up the names of her children, her grandchildren and all their reunions.

Always, always--except for about 20 pages--Jewel loves her husband in a constant, one-note, saintly way. The child with Down’s syndrome is beautifully and affectionately portrayed.

The family move from the Deep South to working-class California is accurate, compassionate, appealing. But two of Jewel’s children go to work for the Royal Crown Cola Co. We know what Lott thinks of that fate: dead-end jobs, with sad tract houses as hard work’s reward.

Leston, after a lifetime of killer work, ends up a janitor. And Jewel, although expressing frequent, perfunctory regret about selling out the happiness of the rest of her family for the good of one disabled though very sweet child, has done just that.

I don’t think any reader would expect Jewel herself to apply introspection, irony, depression or despair to her own condition. But Lott is her creator. And we do have a right to expect that from him.

Lott has depicted for us a saint. But his talent tempts us to want to see below the gleaming surfaces of this ancestral icon.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “The Aspirin Wars” by Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer (Alfred A. Knopf)