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The Moonflower Vine
By Jetta Carleton
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Foreword by Jane Smiley
Harper Perennial, 318 pages, $14.99
How could such a wonderful novel, on the best-seller list for three months when it was published in 1962, disappear? Fortunately, Jane Smiley’s praise of this book has led to its republication. An autobiographical — but certainly not confessional — novel, the only one by its author, puts it in a class with “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Carlton neither romanticizes, nor ridicules, rural Missouri life, and she carefully draws a family full of contradictory passions and desires, in a way that evoked for me Alice McDermott.