Polly Holliday of TV's Home Improvement won a Tony nomination on Broadway playing Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she makes Clarice, the matriarch of Kaye Gibbons' Civil War story On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, sound very big of voice indeed. Clarice is the slave who really runs things on Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, no matter what her nasty, brutish owner, Samuel P. Tate, might think. Holliday has a good time voicing Tate's fulminations, too, neatly distinguishing them from the heroine-narrator Emma Tate's rather daintier dulcet tones. Not that Emma can't be wicked in her own way: she describes a snobbish socialite, "aggressively plain in the face ... who effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." Ms. Holliday puts as much sly violence into that "effused" as she does into Mr. Tate's rages.

Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, circa 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with Frazier's wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.

But beyond their Civil War setting--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons' fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Oprah probably liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depressive illness that drove her mother to suicide.

Our heroine, Emma, shivers under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Mr. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of the war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does Emma's impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.

The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon, an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons' Frazier-esque orgy of historical research for the book is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period.

One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its binary morality, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. The book, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks' John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy.--Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
A plea for racial tolerance is the subtext of Gibbons's estimable new novel, her first foray into historical fiction. Like her previous books (Ellen Foster, 1997, etc.), it is set in the South, but this one takes place during the Civil War era. Now 70 and near death, Emma Garnet Tate begins her account by recalling her youth as a bookish, observant 12-year-old in 1842, living on a Virginia plantation in a highly dysfunctional family dominated by her foulmouthed father, a veritable monster of parental tyranny and racial prejudice. Samuel Tate abuses his wife and six children but he also studies the classics and buys paintings by old masters. Emma's long-suffering mother, of genteel background and gentle ways, is angelic and forgiving; her five siblings' lives are ruined by her father's cruelty; and all are discreetly cared for by Clarice, the clever, formidable black woman who is the only person Samuel Tate respects. (Clarice knows Samuel's humble origins and the dark secret that haunts him, which readers learn only at the end of the book.) Gibbons authentically reproduces the vocabulary and customs of the time: Emma's father says "nigger" while more refined people say Negroes. "Nobody said the word slave. It was servant," Emma observes. At 17, Emma marries one of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon, and spends the war years laboring beside him in a Raleigh hospital. Through graphic scenes of the maimed and dying, Gibbons conveys the horror and futility of battle, expressing her heroine's abolitionist sympathies as Emma tends mangled bodies and damaged souls. By the middle of the book, however, Emma's narration and the portrayal of Clarice as a wise and forbearing earthmother lack emotional resonance. Emma, in fact, is far more interesting as a rebellious child than as a stoic grown woman. One finishes the novel admiring Emma and Clarice but missing the compelling narrative voice that might have made their story truly moving. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-In 1900, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell tells her life story, beginning when she was 12 in antebellum Virginia. Her father, who used brutality and fear to intimidate family, slaves, and servants, killed a slave in a fit of anger. The plantation household was managed by Clarice, a free black woman of courage and loyalty. Emma Garnet's younger sister Maureen was both dutiful and eager to learn the graces that attracted a suitable husband. Independent of spirit, disdainful of housewifely skills, intelligent and opinionated, Emma Garnet determined to escape from Seven Oaks. Details of her reminiscences are sketchy at times, but she met and married Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon and everything her father was not. Her mother unselfishly urged her daughter to take Clarice with her to help them get settled in Raleigh, where Quincy planned to set up his medical practice. Clarice never returned, but devoted herself to the Lowells and their three daughters. Emma Garnet tells her story with unflinching honesty, revealing a complex character who changed from a self-absorbed and indulged child to a loving wife and mother. She eventually opened her home to wounded Confederate soldiers and found new purpose and meaning in her life by helping others. YAs will find Emma Garnet, Maureen, Clarice, and Quincy to be fascinating and endearing characters whose flaws as well as strengths are revealed as the story unfolds. The author's picture of life in the Civil War South is vivid and unsentimental, and her characters are drawn with clarity and sympathy.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
An elderly lady sits in her parlor, contemplating the events that shaped her life. Born in the 1830s, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is the eldest daughter of a poor but aristocratic Southern belle and a rich, opinionated, abusive father. The Tate household is held together by Clarisse, a free black woman, who knew Mr. Tate "when." Tate attempts to control and dominate his wife and children with brute force and harsh words. However, Emma's mother and older brother conspire to nurture Emma's native curiosity and love of learning, until fate brings a Northerner, Quincey Lowell, fresh out of medical school, to Emma's doorstep. At age 17, she marries him and takes Clarisse with her. A new household; three children with a liberal, generous, loving husband; the Civil War; death; and good deeds and bad all pass through her thoughts in a death bed recollection/confession of a life abundantly lived. Gibbons (A Virtuous Woman) relates a touching, evocative story with crystal clarity and brilliant realism. Sally Darling gives a masterful reading. Highly recommended.AJoanna M. Burkhardt., Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Ed. Lib., Providence Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Washington Post Book World, Susan Dodd
Kaye Gibbons is too savvy, too contemporary, and too good a storyteller ... to content herself with a happily-ever-after life. Instead, what her diverting tale suggests is how a life lived in love and service might carry a woman close to wisdom, and that a happily-ever-after death could turn out to be more than just a fairy tale.


From AudioFile
On the occasion of one of her last afternoons, Emma Tate remembers the dark days of her childhood on Seven Oaks Plantation. The Civil War looms. Her wrathful father manipulates his family and plantation with greed and brutality. Marriage to Doctor Quincy Lowell from Massachusetts liberates Emma from the role of the Southern belle. She becomes her husband's partner in the struggle against the war's destruction of bodies and minds. Sally Darling delivers complicated sentences with grace and meaning. Her softly inflected reading conveys age and gentility, anger and love. With Darling, the listener follows this strong woman filled with wistful regret through the ages of her life, as seen in the mirror of her memory. L.R.S. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Gibbons, author most recently of Sights Unseen (1995), has evolved a distinctive narrative style based on the poignant eloquence and acuity of young female narrators struggling to transcend the moral and spiritual failings of their troubled families. Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, her newest creation, fits the mold but with a subtle twist; she's telling her tale at the end of her long and tumultuous life, a life derailed, as so many were, by the Civil War. Like Jane Smiley in her latest novel, Gibbons has gone back to that still-smoldering conflict and imagined it from a wholly personal and feminine perspective, concerned not with politics but with blood and suffering. Two opposing characters embody her dismay over ignorance, brutality, racism, selfishness, and hate versus her belief in virtue, compassion, generosity, knowledge, and love: Emma Garnet's father, an evil, slave-owning tyrant; and Clarice, his black housekeeper, who, in spite of being at the lowest echelon of southern society, is the true leader of their Virginia estate. It is Clarice who teaches Emma Garnet how to be a decent human being, lessons that lead to her controversial but loving marriage to a distinguished and altruistic Northerner, Dr. Quincy Lowell. The Lowells would have lived an easy life had there been no war, but they are drawn inexorably into the horror. Quincy and Clarice literally work themselves to death caring for the wounded, while Emma Garnet, who becomes as adept at surgery as Quincy, survives to mourn the dead. Gibbons is unsparing in her depiction of the gruesome reality of the carnage, and unflinching in her effort to convey the madness of that time and the havoc it wreaked on people's souls. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Gibbons's first outing after anointment by Oprah is a Civil War tale that's historically researched to a fault but psychologically the stuff of melodrama. On what may be the last day of her life, Emma Garnet Lowell, ne Tate, sets out to tell all, from childhood in tidewater Virginia (where she was born in 1830) through marriage, childbirth, the war itself, widowhood, and old age. Everything about the telling in setting and in people is writ large. Of characters who are bad, central and most horrendous by far is Emma's father, Samuel Tate, a crude, tyrannical, pro-slavery plantation owner who's raised himself from nothing, kills one of his own slaves, collects Titians, and prizes his Latin studies. Least bad is Emma's mother Alice, saint and central martyr to this ruffian and gout-plagued husband and father who curses Emma's unborn children when she marries Dr. Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, and moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, taking with her the faithful, kind, stalwart, true household servant Clarice Washington. In Raleigh will be born the couple's three perfect daughters, and there the war will rage, taking an always-greater toll as the years grind on, supplies grow meager, and both Quincy and Emma work beyond endurance in the horrors of the military hospital. History throughout is summoned up in the tiniest of details``her frock, deep green velvet with red grosgrain running like Christmas garlands around her skirt''and though Emma's voice is intended to be of its period, it unfortunately tends also toward the wearying (``Without my brother, I would not have known to use books as a haven, a place to go when pain has invaded my citadel''). A book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure for history-snoopers (hospital scenes among the best) but finding no new ground for the saga of the South. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up more and more aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Bookish and sensitive, young Emma Garnet sets herself against her bumptious, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, at an early age. In the company of her mother and adored brother Whately, Emma Garnet manages to survive with her heart and mind intact. As she tells her story in 1900, she is still prey to her childhood, to the memories of a life that was made bearable in the main by the indomitable family servant Clarice. Emma Garnet secedes from the control of her domineering father to marry Quincy Lowell, a member of the distinguished Boston family. Living in Raleigh on the eve of the Civil War, she and Quincy, with Clarice's constant help, create the ideal happy home. When war destroys the rhythm of their days, Emma Garnet works alongside Quincy, an accomplished surgeon. Assisting him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she comes to see the war as "a conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take her exhausted husband home to Boston, where she begins the long journey of her own reconstruction.

SYNOPSIS

Kaye Gibbons's sixth novel, her first since the dual selection of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman for Oprah's Book ClubT, is the story of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, a level-eyed Southern lady who comes of age in the years leading up to the Civil War. On the occasion of her 70th birthday, Emma decides the time has come to make a clean breast of the tumultuous events of her long life. "Having survived my father and the war, I am capable of anything," she observes. Born to privilege on the James River plantation of Seven Oaks, Emma grows up increasingly aware that her family's fortunes are inextricably linked to slavery -- an awareness that begins when she witnesses the senseless murder of a slave by her brutal, dominating father. She flees Seven Oaks to marry surgeon Quincy Lowell, scion of the Boston Lowells, and the couple settles in Raleigh. During the war, she works beside her husband treating wounded Confederate soldiers and gradually comes to see the grand cause as a "conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take the exhausted Quincy home to Boston, where she begins the journey of her own reconstruction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Frazier

Horace said that our stories should aim to instruct and delight...Kaye Gibbons has achieved both on every page.

San Francisco Chronicle

A master storyteller...Margaret Mitchell's blunderbuss epic...can't hold a sweet-potato candle to these vivid pages.

Portland Oregonian

A novel that will have been worth the wait for Gibbon's fans or anyone else with a passionate interest in the Civil War.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An occasion for even more accolades.

San Antonio Express-News