Books

The Blue Star
By Tony Earley, Little, Brown, 2008, 286 pp.

Is it really eight years since Jim the Boy, Tony Earley's extraordinary book about childhood? The boy of the title is Jim Glass Jr., who is fatherless, a heart attack claiming Jim Sr. a week before his son's birth.

His adventures aren't all that startling: Jim worries about his birthday; he takes his first trip away from home with a favorite uncle; he sees the ocean for the first time — things like that.

What is special about Jim the Boy is how gracefully and tenderly Earley tells of the unripe world of a young boy who lives in Aliceville, N.C., in 1934.

One remarkable scene follows another as Earley records the year Jim is 10. It is a book that balances the ingenuousness of youth with the knowledge that maturity means loss.

Near the end of that book, Jim stands on a boulder high above Aliceville, realizing "how little space Aliceville occupied in the world."

Now, in a new book and with equal grace and tenderness, Earley recounts another year in the life of Jim Glass Jr., who is now eight years older and is graduating high school.

The Blue Star, too, is about growing up. Jim has fallen hard for Chrissie Steppe, the young woman whose hair tumbles over the book on his desk in the history class they are both enduring. But Chrissie has been spoken for by Bucky Bucklaw, who, after recently joining the Navy, has been stationed at Pearl Harbor.

That situation subtly informs the book, for The Blue Star is very much about leave-taking as well.

The specter of the war is everywhere: the book takes its title from the banners with a blue star hanging in homes that have a family member in the war; a local mill makes khaki twill for Army uniforms; troop trains constantly lumber through Aliceville, bringing the war to the home front.

Yet despite the changes, there remain evocative, adolescent moments: squealing off in The Major, Jim's cherished Ford V8; a recent breakup with Norma Harris, the girl whom Jim sees as just not exotic enough for his taste; a new, "forbidden" relationship with Chrissie that blossoms during a mountaintop idyll as they pretend to be an old, married couple.

But such innocence cannot be sustained. There's a quiet racism in Aliceville. There's a war on. There's a world to see. Some sons are leaving home; others are returning in coffins. And Jim has sensed that Aliceville is not all there is to life.

At the end of Jim the Boy, Jim's Uncle Zeno tells him, "We've got to work hard and keep moving and try to do the right thing." At the bittersweet end of The Blue Star, Jim steps onto a moving troop train with those words in mind.

Once again, Tony Earley's genuine, wonderfully sentimental achievement is his belief that there is always home for Jim, home with Mama and his three uncles. They'll still be there — maybe Chrissie will be, too — after he's seen the world.

Steven Whitton is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.