A CURE FOR DREAMS by Kaye...

A CURE FOR DREAMS by Kaye Gibbons (Vintage: $10). Gibbons’ novel about four generations of Southern women reads like a series of linked short stories. The women of the O’Cadhain clan are bound to the soil of Kentucky by ties that strengthen--and weaken. When they try to leave Bell County for the big city or their ancestral home in Ireland, they fail like tropical plants exposed to a Northern winter. These women know poverty like a neighbor: “For centuries they had been in training to have nothing, so everything was more or less working perfectly according to God’s plan.” Although her male characters fare badly, Gibbons succeeds in depicting the closed world of a small Southern town, where the soft murmur of women’s voices drowns out the noise of progress in the outside world.