Although there has been much ballyhoo over its incipient demise, the American short story is doing just fine. Compared with England, where there is little if any tradition in the form, the American story looks ready for a chicken-fried steak and a night on the town.
This haleness has to do with the fact that, conglomerates aside, America remains a deeply regional country, something Southern writers seem to grasp best. In the past 70 years, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter shifted the literary Mason-Dixon line past the Carolinas and into the Deep South and in doing so birthed a generation of Southern short-story scribes.
Kentucky-born Bobbie Ann Mason follows in the footsteps of this noble trinity. She is a nimble storyteller with a knack for dialogue. She also has an instinctual ability to capture the circumambience of home. In collections such as “Shiloh and Other Stories” and “Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail,” she eloquently portrayed the ways suburbanization has fractured that light.
But what happens when – by distance, development, death or simple drifting – that luminosity fades to the thinnest of particle waves? The answer is Mason’s latest book, “Nancy Culpepper,” a strikingly jumbled assemblage of stories featuring a character Mason introduced in “The New Yorker” in 1980.
Nancy Culpepper is a historian who has gravitated north into Yankee territory, thanks to her marriage to Jack, a photographer who doesn’t quite get the deep-fried cuisine and hearty certainties of her native Kentucky.
In the static title story, Nancy discovers a photograph of a distant relative who shares her name. Naturally, Nancy wants to know more about her. As a book, “Nancy Culpepper” peers similarly backward into the past – not to mention sideways into the lives of her aging parents – and asks the same of its main character: Who is this modern Nancy Culpepper?
These stories provide a variety of answers. In “Blue Country,” Nancy is a conflicted Southerner at the apex of her orbit away from home. She learns of her grandmother’s death while attending a wedding in New England but stays on. “Proper Gypsies” presents Nancy in late middle age, separated from her husband, biding her time in London.
In her best moments, Mason can be a graceful storyteller, so capable of finding the fissure into a character’s thoughts that one takes for granted the access she provides. “Lying Doggo” provides a beautiful example of this in action. The tale concerns Jack’s old dog, Grover Cleveland, and how his impending death casts a shadow over Nancy’s loyalty to his owner.
As this book creeps closer to home, though, its prose becomes fitful and insular. The heart of the book is a 90-page novella. “Spence + Lila,” published in 1988 as its own book. The story of Nancy’s parents’ passage through a health crisis, it reads like an act of compression gone awry.
In attempting to present all the conflicting narratives of a family life, Mason has done justice to none of them. The best thing the novella does is paint the slow, painful dissolution of a family home.
Understandably, children brought up around the pinch of rural poverty grow into adults who make sure they will not be dependent on the whims of the land, let alone its morés. How fitting then that Nancy, who appears sensible and calm through her own eyes, sounds like a scold in “Spence + Lila.” She is forever telling her parents that a diet of Cokes and hamburgers is what’s killing them.
She’s right, of course, but in wanting her parents to be like her, Nancy has forgotten where “they” came from. “He can remember when he and Lila were courting,” Mason writes of Nancy’s father and mother. “A hamburger and Coke at Fred and Sue’s Drive-in was the most delicious meal they had ever had.” As these poignant, but often torturously conflicted stories reveal, the fact that Nancy no longer enjoys such meals reveals how far she’s really traveled.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
