A Brief Summary and synopsis:
Jayne Anne Phillips’s "
Lark and Termite" concerns a set of interrelated characters in West Virginia and Korea in the 1950s. Phillips shifts between two locations: a tunnel beneath a railway bridge at the start of the Korean War in 1950, where twenty-one-year-old Corporal Robert Leavitt is trapped with a mob of refugees being fired upon by confused American troops, and Winfield, West Virginia, 1959, where an unconventional family that includes Leavitt’s autistic son rides out a torrential flood.
Lark and Termite features an epigraph from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
The novel recalls Faulkner’s both in its reliance on a mentally impaired character and in its use of multiple points of view. Phillips moves between the perspectives of Leavitt; Leavitt’s autistic son, Termite; Termite’s half-sister, Lark; and Lark and Termite’s aunt, Nonie.
Robert Leavitt has arrived in Korea by way of Japan, where he played trumpet in an army band before being chosen to join a group of American servicemen in an intensive Korean language program. A month after the surprise invasion of South Korea by North Korea, Leavitt is guiding a large mass of refugees from an evacuated village when they are fired upon by American airplanes, who are under the assumption that refugees have been infiltrated by North Korean soldiers.
In the chaos of the firefight, Leavitt helps a Korean girl who is traveling with a blind boy, probably her brother, and an older woman. Leavitt flees with the refugees into a tunnel—but not before he is mortally wounded by gunfire in his legs and back.
As Leavitt marches with the refugees and after he becomes trapped in the tunnel, his mind reaches back to his life in America—specifically his youth in Philadelphia and his time on base in Fort Knox, Kentucky. While at Fort Knox, Leavitt visits nearby Louisville, where he plays trumpet in a jazz band at a club and brothel run by Bill Onslow. Leavitt falls in love with the jazz band’s lead singer, a thirty-year-old woman from West Virginia named Lola.
Three weeks before Leavitt ships out to Asia, Lola tells him she is pregnant with his child, and they marry. As Leavitt fades in and out of consciousness, he hears Lola speaking to him. Leavitt knows their baby is due any day now, and he believes he will somehow know when Lola gives birth.
I had the distinct fortune to attend a talk about "
Lark And Termite" held by the incomparable Ken Madden. "Lark and Termite" is considered transcendental fiction in which we are taken to the extreme edge of literature and the very sound of the word on the page. This novel asks the big questions-- can the "blind and dumb" such as Termite really communicate? Can Termite know emotion and know of his surroundings? When is the assistance that given to this family to much? When is it not enough and should the "government" be involved in what happens to Termite.
This book deals with the issues of what are the rules of reality, should they be followed, when are they followed and when if ever are they broken. We get beautiful prose that in many ways reads as poetry that gives us insight into exactly what the world is and in many instances how Termite and others really see it.
The best example of this is on page 70:
"He's alone. It was his cry, his voice. His revolver in his hand. He clutches it tightly but knows he has blacked out. Time has passed. Hours. He sees the inverted face of the girl over him, and the face of the boy on her back. She's waited until dusk and now she;s touching him, moving him, pulling him deeper in tot he tunnel. The boy clasps her neck from behind with his locked arms, nearly flattened against her as she crouches over Leavitt."
Phillips pulls the rug out from under you and you, the reader, are in for a rare treat of words and phrases that entertain, entwine and enrapture you.
My rating 4 out of 5 stars.
Other books that fall into the transcendental genre would be:
"A Burnt Out Case" by Graham Greene
"Siddhartha" by Herman Heese
"The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Silko
Author Terry McMillan performs an intimate reading and analysis of her bestselling novels in this funny and profound talk, blurring the lines between fiction and reality and revealing the spiritual power of 
