A vivid, moving collection that explores the unrecoverable past.
A collection of short stories and a novella examine the trials of rural life in a fictional Pennsylvania town.
Snodgrass’ assemblage of fiction, which includes more than three dozen short stories, is set in and around Furnass, Pennsylvania, an old mill town straining under the pressure of modern capitalism and its relentless spread. The prolific construction of McMansions is like a death toll for the area’s vanishing farms, which seem terminally incapable of keeping pace with the times. One of the abiding themes is the disappearance not only of farms, but also legacies—fathers lament the unwillingness of their sons to take over lands they can no longer maintain. For example, in the collection’s novella, The Hill Wife, Noah, an octogenarian farmer, struggles to make ends meet. He wonders if his son, William, a successful real estate agent, pines for his father’s death so he can sell the land. The author presents a typically sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Noah’s tug of war between pride in his son’s accomplishments and resentment at his cold profiteering. In “The Easy Part,” a farmer named Clay is pressured to sell his property, but he clings to the land that has been in his family for eight generations. The short tales are typically very brief, some only a page or two, giving them an impressionistic character, quick snapshots of lives suggestive of backstories never fully revealed. A black-and-white photograph by the author accompanies each tale, highlighting the fiction’s ambient forlornness—a sad nostalgia for a culture that is disappearing not slowly but assuredly.
Snodgrass is at his best establishing an atmosphere of quiet desperation—many of his protagonists, like Clay, know that they can’t win but cling nevertheless to their rapidly displaced ways of life and the inheritances from their ancestors. This stubborn refusal to go quietly can take the form of a defiant, if feckless, pride or materialize as shame. In “An Annunciation,” BJ walks into a clinic in her “brown plaid Walmart five-dollar special jacket” only to be confronted by better-heeled patients. She worries that she’s quickly pegged as “white trash.” The author also unflinchingly tackles the suddenness and inevitability of death and the “endless guilts” of infidelity. Snodgrass artfully contrives an entire literary cosmos, a fossilizing fictional world that faces extinction. But that thick air of lament can be oppressively lugubrious—this is a leaden universe without wit or levity, and the ponderousness can be suffocating. Some of the stories seem to be straining to impart a lesson or function like a moral parable, resulting in a tincture of didacticism. In these tales, treacly sentimentality rears its head. In “Be Still My Heart,” Mary Beth is forced to witness the death of her loved ones repeatedly, a curse of longevity. Her sorrow, though, comes across as canned: “ ‘I had desires too,’ she said out loud, shouted down the hallway. ‘I wanted things too. I’m more than just another fancy plate hanging on the wall. More than just a figurine on a shelf. More than something to put in a stack with all the other stuff you’ve used up but keep around just so nobody else can have it.’ ” Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful compilation, poetically meticulous and often touching.
A vivid, moving collection that explores the unrecoverable past.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-99-977005-4
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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