SOURCE: "Voices of the New South," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4469, November 25, 1988, p. 1306.

Rosenheim is an American novelist and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines the "narrative tone" in Ellen Foster, contending that "the voice is distinctly Southern … [and focuses our attention as much on the story as the voice telling it."]

In Kaye Gibbons's first novel, Ellen Foster, detachment is the keynote of an eerily removed narrative tone. The narrator is Ellen herself, recalling a personal history of repeated tragedy and abuse. When the heroine says at the beginning of the novel, "I had me a egg sandwich for breakfast", some readers may groan, anticipating the rural, folksy, semi-literate Southern dialect that has degenerated by now into self-caricature. Yet, unselfconscious, undramatic, never aggrandizing, the quietness of the girl's account subtly magnifies the awfulness of what has happened to her—her father, a brutal drunkard, drives...