Labor Pains
Reviewed by Valerie Sayers
Sunday, January 6, 2002; Page BW09

THE BRIDGE
By Doug Marlette
HarperCollins. 388 pp. $26

In a cartoon, much depends on the beat of the caption, and Doug Marlette, a political cartoonist and the creator of the "Kudzu" strip, is especially good with words. A cartoonist is a storyteller, a jokester, an up-ender of expectations and, often, a conscience-pricker. Marlette transfers his ease with all these roles to his first novel, The Bridge.

The Bridge is one of those present-day stories in which a character uncovers a hidden truth about his family's history. The hero, Pick Cantrell, is a cartoonist, of all things, but we will not linger over the roman à clef question, even though it does tease a reader throughout. Most of Pick's current troubles -- which involve being fired from a New York City paper on account of his temper and returning to his childhood stomping grounds in North Carolina -- reflect the dilemma of those members of the white working class who grew up in the small-town South of the '50s and went off to college in the '60s, where they found politics and a measure of sophistication. When they returned years later to their Southern hometowns, it was to buy the Big Houses that their parents and grandparents never so much as dreamed of owning.