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Lark & Termite
By Jayne Anne Phillips
Knopf, 254 pages, $24
Jayne Anne Phillips captured my attention more than 25 years ago with the publication of her first novel, “Machine Dreams” and I’ve been hooked since. I’ve admired her fiction but never felt quite the same way — that a novel was truly incandescent, that it lit up a world. The basic elements seem simple enough — two weekends in July, nine years apart, a teenage girl named Lark and her little brother who can’t walk and doesn’t talk, nicknamed Termite for his incredible ability to burrow into the soul. Set in West Virginia and Korea in the ’50s, during the war and No Gun Ri massacre, the novel is moving, intelligent about power and authority, violence and love.
