"Burnt Mountain" (Grand Central Publishing), by Anne Rivers Siddons: Burnt Mountain, the peak in Georgia, is among the southernmost in the ancient Appalachian range. It rises to grab the occasional dusting of snow in winter and swells with crowds of campers and hikers seeking refuge in summer.
To those classic services, best-selling novelist Anne Rivers Siddons adds numerous romantic ones for the peak to perform. Her Burnt Mountain is the repository of childhood memories, the source of marital conflict and revelation, and the setting for one character's unsettling breakdown. It is hard to imagine a real place hosting such intense pivot points in the lives of so many interrelated people, but the majestic peak largely holds its own. At Burnt Mountain, her central characters come of age, honeymoon, vacation, die and engage in a deeply mysterious scandal involving an Irish folklorist, a smarmy businessman and scores of young boys.
Siddons is at her most effective rendering the Southern landscape and the region's languorous summers. Lots of iced tea and lemonade and even mint juleps are consumed on porches. Children play in the shade, women swoon from the heat, for sure, but more from frustration at not climbing the social register — or not fast enough. And there's lots of swimming, in pools, in rivers and in lakes. Siddons masterfully portrays growing up in a small town outside Atlanta, much like her hometown. The terrain is rich with grand old houses lovingly restored; there's a begrudging nod to "Gone With the Wind," which the young people call GWTW; and the race and class divides are so vast that every key character is white, Protestant and wealthy. The lone Jew's heritage automatically grants him outsider status and seems to imply his financial success.
Even as they age, Siddons' characters focus on their sensations and needs and aspirations, but that single-mindedness coaxes readers to side with her central character. Anyone who appreciates the instant gratification of romance novels — "Burnt Mountain" seems designed for a few days of beach reading — will be quickly taken in by the quiet and beautiful tomboy, whose father dies young and whose vengeful mother never outgrows her tendency to belittle her daughter. When Thayer Wentworth figures out young that life's nastiest snarls may not all be loosened and smoothed and retied in neat bows, we fret with her. And when everything inevitably does start to work out, we are as relieved as she is.
But that satisfaction is shallow. There are just too many snags along the way in "Burnt Mountain," including problems as fundamental as time lapsing unevenly for different characters. In the same period that Thayer attends college, marries and lackadaisically takes a job, another character also earns a graduate degree, has two children, wins acclaim in his career and separates from his wife.
Siddons, who has adroitly illustrated Southern race politics in the past, also slips into anachronisms so uncomfortable they are nearly fatal. There's a trip for our wealthy heroine to a dangerous back-alley abortion clinic, even though it's roughly 1990 and abortions have been widely available in Atlanta for many years. The mid-1990s civic scene in Atlanta lacks black residents of any economic means, and Asian visitors are mocked for pronouncing the word barbecue as "bobby-coo." ''Burnt Mountain" thankfully doesn't attempt to traverse the sociopolitical minefield that was the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. But the novel might have worked better set earlier, in a time we're now willing to believe was simpler.