New Fiction by Regional Authors, May 2001 by Hal Jacobs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Clay's Quilt. By Silas House, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95. In her day, Anneth Sizemore was the wildest woman in Crow County, Ky., a coal mining area in Appalachia. Anneth lived hard and died young. Her son, Clay, remembers only a few details about the night of her death. They were squeezed into a car filled with her friends, driving along an icy mountain road. Clay, who was 4 at the time, remembers the warmth of his mother's body and the song she was humming, Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee." Music is a potent force in Clay's Quilt, as powerful as family, home and community. In fact, the novel resonates with so much music, both up close and in the background, that it resembles a longer version of a country song by Steve Earle or Lucinda Williams (Clay's favorites). And the rhythm doesn't stop there, but extends to the pulse of streams, hills, days and seasons. As the novel opens, Clay is a young coal miner following in
his mother's footsteps. Though close to his gentle Aunt Easter,
he loves getting wild drunk with his best friend, Cake, and dancing
at the Hilltop Club. Then he hears Alma Moseley's fiddle. He feels the pain of each note; at the same time, he feels dizzy from the beauty of her fiddling: "The music seemed to flow right out of her skin." Alma is of the Moseley Family gospel singers, but lately she has left her family and violent husband to live with her hell-raising sister. At first, Alma resists Clay's charms and good looks. But when she and Clay finally share a quiet moment together, Alma realizes she can no longer fight the rhythms pulling them closer. "I got my eye on you," Clay says during their ride on the Ferris wheel at the fall heritage festival. "Well, nobody ain't never told me that," Alma replies. "If you got your eye on me, I guess I don't have much of a choice." Silas House's debut novel is about being young and alert and
powerful and really in love for the first time. It's not about
working in coal mines - the coal dust is merely for effect because
we never see Clay below the ground. Instead, House has written
a poignant, yet mostly upbeat country song about a young man
coming to terms with himself and his community. And how that
understanding leads to coping with a tragic experience. As Lee Smith writes on the book jacket, "Silas House is from there [Southern Appalachia], he lives there now, and he gets it right." That about sums it up. House works as a rural mail carrier in Lily, Kentucky (pop. 800). "Clay's Quilt" won first place in the 1998 Kentucky chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters fiction competition. FIRST LOOK: Evangeline leaned back into the song, letting her voice rip from far down inside her. Clay half-expected her to break into tongues as she sang about being a cuckold. Alma also seemed to be taken by a higher power and moved around the stage with the slit in her skirt sneaking higher up on her leg, her body writhing with each cry of the fiddle. Clay decided right then and there that he wanted to know her. He wanted to hold her hand flat in his palm and look for the red lines the strings of the fiddle had left across her fingers. The Language of Good-bye. By Maribeth Fischer, Dutton, $23.95. Annie and Will are drowning in love. For three years they've been sneaking around Richmond parking lots and motels under their spouses' noses. Now that they have finally left their marriages to live together, they spend all their time fighting back waves of love and grief. Annie, who teaches English to international students, leaves behind her childhood sweetheart, with whom she shared two painful miscarriages. Will, a child psychologist, leaves behind his young daughter, but brings along the memory of many pre-Annie affairs, a secret that he knows would shatter their fragile relationship. They live with terrible uncertainty. Like Annie's foreign students, they have renounced their pasts to start a new life. If the present doesn't work, they're in trouble. The story is told from many points of view - not only Annie and Will's, but also from the perspective of their crushed ex-partners. And, as if that's not enough, there's even the perspective of a Korean-born student of Annie's who knows more about loss than all of these 30-somethings combined. In each of these characters' lives, it's as if the world has shrunk to a small place that holds only them and their hurt. But, slowly, excruciatingly, we watch them shed their cocoons and emerge as different people. In her debut novel, Maribeth Fischer, an award-winning essay writer who lives in Charlotte, N.C., tackles the complications of a marital meltdown. Her mostly 30-something characters have a reason to feel grim and self-absorbed, but it's hard to tell if they felt much better before things started to go wrong. FIRST LOOK: Despite her happiness with Will, what she often felt - in the midst of making love with him or teaching a class or standing in line at the supermarket blankly reading the headlines of the "National Enquirer" - was grief. A word whose root meant "heavy" or "burden." Grief. Annie felt as if she were pushing it around in front of her like the shopping carts the homeless wheeled. All the bundles and rags and scraps of her life, her past. The Cry of an Occasion. Edited by Richard Bausch, Louisiana State University Press, $29.95. This collection of short stories by some of the South's best writers speaks volumes about the southern experience. Contributors, including Madison Smartt Bell, Shelby Foote and Jill McCorkle (19 in all), submitted one distinctly Southern story that expresses "a singular episode of mind, heart, or will." The result is a literary food court that offers something for everyone - from episodes in biker bars to Indian mounds to graveyards. Is there a common thread among these stories of violence, innocence, madness, and random acts of kindness? The writers seem united by a desire to take a hard look at a region they love and write about it with honesty and compassion. FIRST LOOK (from Lee Smith's "Between the Lines"): All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on, from Glenn's mother taking up with dark-skinned gypsies to my own daddy and his postcard to that silly Lavonne and her cup of coffee to Margie with her head in the oven, to John Marcel Wilkes and myself, God help me, and all of it so long ago in those holy woods. Maggie Sweet. By Judith Minthorn Stacy, HarperCollins, $23.00. Maggie Sweet is a typical small-town Southern housewife. In her own words, she is bored, but resigned to the whole thing. All her life, this nice Methodist girl from Poplar Grove, N.C., has taken orders. First from her parents, who shipped her away to nursing school to put some miles between her and her high school sweetheart. Then from her husband, a 10th-grade biology teacher, who just spent their life savings on a family cemetery plot. He wants to spend eternity together, while Maggie was hoping for a nice family vacation with their two teenaged daughters in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Now, on the eve of her 20th high school reunion, Maggie learns her old sweetie is moving back to town. And he's available. Will she try to get over her midlife crisis by staying in the kitchen and whipping out tiered Jell-O rings for her unappreciative family? Or will she finally start making some noise? Judith Minthorn Stacy lives in Mooresville, N.C. Maggie Sweet, her first novel, was originally published as Styles by Maggie Sweet and won the 1998-99 Carolina Novel Award. FIRST LOOK: When my daughters come to me for advice on their wedding day, the one thing I'll tell them is never be a "good woman." Over the years, I've learned that good women get to carry their own groceries, take the children to the emergency room alone, help shingle the roof, and make do with appliances that haven't been right since 1976. Truelove & Homegrown Tomatoes. By Julie Cannon, Hill Street Press, $19.95. Is there anything worse than paying too much for store tomatoes? That's just one of the questions posed in this homegrown story about a widow woman getting over the loss of her husband. Imo Lavender gets off to a shaky start, but soon enough the magic of gardening restores her spirits - and her desire for companionship. What does raising homegrown tomatoes have in common with searching for a good man? In both cases, you need to eliminate the suckers as soon as possible. Julie Cannon is an avid tomato gardener who lives in Watkinsville, Ga. This is her first novel. FIRST LOOK: My secret is to pinch suckers off when they're still teeny-tiny. Less than an inch. That way, the poor tomato plant won't bleed. Tomatoes are a lot like people. When you wait too long to pinch off their suckers, they get stressed out and sickly. Their energy is just plum wasted.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, May 27, 2001 |
