So Pick's story is one of class mobility, in which the economic and political divides between the generations breed anger and guilt. The conflict is personified here in Pick's grandmother, Mama Lucy, for whom Marlette saves his best captions. Pick tells us that his grandmother was "the blue-haired ayatollah who dominated her family and frightened and humiliated me as a child, marking my impressionable young psyche indelibly, informing my relationship with women forever, and supplying me with radar, distant early warning, for Chernobyl Woman, the domineering female, and her secret sharer, the passive, gelded male."

After such a scathing sketch, you might expect a sexual conflict to develop for Pick, and sure enough, as he and his wife switch money-making roles they watch their marriage fray. Their struggles mirror those of Mama Lucy and her husband, a deputy sheriff she spent most of her life belittling and shunning. Pick grows up despising his grandmother for her emotional banishments and blames her for sending his mother to a mental hospital. His idealization of his martyr-mother and demonization of his bully-grandmother stoke his flamboyant rage.


Mama Lucy, nearing her 90th birthday, is in failing health when Pick returns to North Carolina. As he pokes, gingerly, around in his family history, he is surprised to hear that his grandmother was bayoneted during the General Textile Strike of 1934, an actual event that Marlette fictionalizes in flashbacks. Even with some bumpy transitions as the narrative moves between past and present, the historical scenes are fascinating, not so much in their singular moments as in their cumulative force.

Marlette tells these tales in broad strokes, but Mama Lucy's memories gather moral momentum and provide a powerful challenge to our stereotypical vision of the right-to-work white South. Her recreation of the strike makes it clear that it took brutal force and manipulation to frighten the South into its image as the most anti-labor region of the country. And it took a double dose of poverty -- white lintheads, or millworkers, used to leave their children with black women who were poorer still -- to stun the Southern workforce into its seemingly docile posture.

It's a great story -- exuberant, proud, myth-challenging -- and Marlette has a great, Dickensian time with the telling. He seems to revel in all the narrative tricks of the big, popular novel: The plot is filled with clever foreshadowing and a series of physical conflicts that progress to a violent denouement. In the background, the villains are very, very bad, but in the foreground Pick and his Mama Lucy are complicated characters finding their ways to subtle truths. One small disappointment is that the normally sharp, original language (Charlotte is a city that looks as if it were "created on a computer screen at Disney World and just arrived by E-mail on the border of the Carolinas") sometimes flattens out into more workaday prose.

But The Bridge is a hugely ambitious novel. It encompasses history, myth, sexual politics and family psychosis, and it takes some good satirical pokes at 21st-century life along the way. By the end of his journey home, Pick Cantrell is willing to rearrange his vision of the past and even to challenge his assessment of Chernobyl Woman. Doug Marlette has done a novelistic good deed in digging up this buried and crucial piece of Southern history, and clearly he's had some fun doing it. €

Valerie Sayers, director of the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels.