Narrator outshines plot

THROUGH THE PALE DOOR. By Brian Ray. Hub City Writers Project. 203 pages. $24.95.

Some narrators cannot help but outshine and outgrow the confines of a novel's plot. Such is the case with Sarah West in Brian Ray's "Through the Pale Door."

The novel charts West's last summer before college, when, slumming it a little, she takes a thoroughly blue-collar job at her estranged father's steel mill in order to save a little money and ease the gravitational pull of her mother and fellow artist, Monday West.

As Sarah West meditates on art, life, social class and family, the trajectory of the novel barrels forth relentlessly, threatening to detract attention from Ray's marked achievements elsewhere.

The steel mill just outside of Columbia acts as an industrial challenge to West's idiosyncratic attempts to order her messy life, though it never comes across as terribly important to the novel's character-driven development.

Heavily foreshadowed from the very beginning of the novel, its melodramatic resolution in cold, impersonal death cannot help but feel like an afterthought, given the loving attention Ray devotes to nurturing his narrator's voice and to his study of family ties.

There is in fact a love story in the plot between West and a fellow employee and artist named Edgewood, but it serves as so much fodder for bringing out her reminiscences of a fraught dual life as both daughter and caretaker of her unpredictable mother.

West's summer becomes littered not only with rebar filings, but also with crushing love and loss. And yet what happens in the novel seems almost cursory when the reader follows West through her attempts to make sense of her mother's debilitating and oftentimes dangerous mental illness.

The question of inheritance is always lurking in Sarah West's narrative, which gives even greater strength to Ray's sympathetic and truly deft examination of manic depression and its ability to strain a family past unbearable tolerances.

Winner of the South Carolina First Novel Prize, Ray's "Through the Pale Door" is a virtuoso, if ultimately unbalanced, affair.

Sarah and Monday West are brilliantly realized characters, though they often seem in dire need of a less confining, maybe even less industrial, plot.