Hair Ado

Her rampaging curls seldom at rest, Sarah Gilbert is the funniest woman writer from the South since Flannery O'Connor last fed the peacocks. A tad over thirty, this former beautician and constant hurricane is the author of Hairdo (Warner), a straight-ahead comedy about a small-town head-butt between cliques of bouffants and beehives. Mourning women make themselves at home at a widower's house, a hairstylist visits the morgue to do a dead woman's coif. ("You know, you never did have much of a neck.") Yet there's no trace of Southern Gothic. Sunshine is spun through the acrylic weave. Based in Columbia, South Carolina, Gilbert has just about bagged her second novel, Dixie Riggs, about a couple of redneck girls with men problems and model aspirations. "Southern women come at it from an angle," says Gilbert about their approach to romance, and her writing baits that angle like a hook. She teases the reader with slack, then snaps the punch line.

J.W.