Abundance at the Bookstore
This week, join Bobbie Ann Mason and four other prize-winning writers at readings around town
BOBBIE ANN MASON Last summer’s An Atomic Romance, Bobbie Ann Mason’s first novel in 10 years, was worth the wait in every way. Set in an unnamed area of middle America, the rural landscape—always as much a character in Mason’s writing as any person—is recognizably the western Kentucky of her best fiction, but the uranium enrichment plant at the center of the story is something wholly new. Mason has often explored (some would say obsessively explored) the conflict between the old, slow ways of the farm and the restless urge to see those heaving furrows only in a rearview mirror. But in An Atomic Romance, out this week in paperback, Mason turns to the much more complicated situation of those who stay behind, watching helplessly as modernity enters rural America disguised as desperately needed jobs that come with a toxic form of overtime pay: deformed frogs, unearthly flames that leap out of junk heaps during rain showers, beryllium disease, cancer. When Reed Futrell, a skilled maintenance worker at the local nuclear plant, gets dumped by his girlfriend Julia for failing to act on her fear for his safety, he is forced to reconcile his own willful blindness with a family legacy of defeat and despair. It’s classic Mason turned up a notch to address not just the individual tragedies of unsung Americans, but the greater calamity that awaits us all as the buried secrets of the Cold War burble out of rich Kentucky soil.
All of which makes Mason’s new story collection, Nancy Culpepper, a serious anticlimax. The stories, written intermittently over the last 26 years, feature one of the farm girls who got away, never fully forgiving herself for leaving the land behind. But this across-the-decades grouping is uneven and disjointed in exactly the same measure that An Atomic Romance is integrated and whole. Still, the novella at its heart, “Spence + Lila,” is a masterpiece, too long out of print till now and worth the price of the book alone. Mason will read from Nancy Culpepper at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 6 p.m. July 19. –MARGARET RENKL
STEPHEN HINES/LAURA INGALLS WILDER With a knack for finding “lost” works by some of the world’s most beloved authors, Stephen Hines—a Nolensville author, poet and “literary prospector”—has pored over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s crime-solving efforts and rediscovered Christmas stories by Louisa May Alcott. For his latest project, he returns to an earlier subject, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The “Little House” books, about Wilder’s girlhood as her family moved west across the prairie in the mid- to late 1800s, have remained favorites of children since the 1930s and provide a charming glimpse into the American frontier experience. A popular 1970s TV series based on the books only reinforced their popularity. So it’s no surprise that Hines’ earlier Wilder books, including a collection of the newspaper columns she wrote as a young farm wife, sold more than 250,000 copies. His most recent literary sleuthing has led to three new books: Writings to Young Women From Laura Ingalls Wilder (Vols. 1 and 2) and Writings to Young Women on Laura Ingalls Wilder. The first two volumes are collections of Wilder’s writings; the third features reminiscences of those who knew her. Hines signs his latest three books at 1 p.m. July 15 at the Brentwood Barnes & Noble. –MICHELLE JONES
DARNELL ARNOULT The Brush Creek, Tenn., resident and Scene cover girl makes another Nashville stop on her tour to promote her debut novel, Sufficient Grace. The story of a literally mad housewife whose inspired visions shake up the lives of two families, Sufficient Grace is a combination of top-notch chick lit and serious Southern fiction à la Kaye Gibbons or Lee Smith. The book has earned props from such disparate entities as Publishers Weekly and the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Arnoult has also published a prize-winning volume of poems, What Travels With Us, in the past year. Her work hits a lot of hot buttons—gender wars, mental illness, race relations—and she has an engaging personal story of triumph after long years of struggle as a single mom. This may be your last chance to see her before she starts rubbing elbows with Oprah. Arnoult will read and sign Sufficient Grace at Borders Books, 2501 West End Ave., at 6 p.m. July 17. –MARIA BROWNING
JOSHILYN JACKSON Just when it seems perfectly clear that Southern literature has been chewed up, swallowed and emitted in another form by Wal-Mart and MTV and all the other agents of cultural homogenization, or relegated to the sole province of male MFA-ers secretly longing to shoot big guns and spit tobacco juice, a novelist like Joshilyn Jackson comes along and writes something indisputably Southern and funny and smart. Nonny Frett, the protagonist of Between, Georgia, was born to a useless teen in the town’s white trash clan, the Crabtrees, but raised as a cherished adopted daughter by its most prominent family. Between is thus Nonny’s birthplace and a metaphor for her very life. The lily-white Fretts have their own dark secrets—this is a Southern novel, after all—but the page-turning plot isn’t limited to ferreting them out. It’s also driven by Nonny’s pending divorce and possible romance with the owner of Between’s sole bookstore, and by several murderous Dobermans, a pair of elderly twins (one a deaf-blind sculptor, the other a self-mutilating paranoiac), a little Baptist girl who desperately wants to be Jewish, and a doll-and-butterfly museum—not to mention the Crabtree’s Alabama cousins, who (as Alabama kin always do) make even scabby, ass-drunk Georgia folk look positively genteel. When all these elements collide, the sparks ignite a conflagration that forces Nonny to an understanding of her own identity beyond family ties. Between, Georgia is the most satisfying beach read of the summer, and a good bit more than that, too. Jackson reads at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 6 p.m. July 17. –MARGARET RENKL KIM EDWARDS When a song is beautiful, sometimes you can’t tell which part affects you more—the lyrics or the melody. So it is with Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, with its captivating story and sentences so finely tuned they feel like poetry. It’s 1964 Kentucky, and a deep snowfall forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own children. One, a boy, is healthy and pink, but an unexpected twin arrives, twisted and tiny and bearing the unmistakable features of Down syndrome. Henry instructs the nurse to take the baby to an institution; when his wife regains consciousness, he tells her that it died at birth. What follows is an account of a child born without a past, a mother’s sense of loss, a marriage strained by secrets, and siblings who have never met. Edwards, a creative writing professor at the University of Kentucky, writes with a clean, quiet prose that would turn pages even without such a shocking story. With chapters that jump from character to character, the Henrys’ tale flows and repeats itself from different perspectives, suggesting that the family’s wholeness can never be truly realized. Edwards signs copies of her debut novel at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 7 p.m. July 18. –CLAIRE SUDDATH
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