Jonathan Allison
The University Press of Kentucky is proud to publish Patchwork: A Bobbie Ann Mason Reader, which brings together many of the author’s most beloved short stories and excerpts from her novels and memoirs, as well as essays, interviews, and recent work. In its variety and brilliance, it is certainly a “patchwork,” as the title suggests, but the contents have been carefully selected by the author to highlight themes such as war, love, marriage, and family history.
As a writer, Mason rose swiftly to the national stage. Publication of her first story, “Offerings,” in the New Yorker marked the beginning of a long relationship with that magazine, where she has published many stories and pieces of reporting, some of which appear in the present volume. Her work, although often regional in setting, has national and international significance and appeal. If Mason is a great southern writer, she is also a great American writer and, as one critic noted, one of those writers who, “by concentrating their attention on a few square miles of native turf, are able to open up new and surprisingly wide worlds for the delighted reader” (New York Review of Books).
“Shiloh” portrays the relationship between Leroy, a truck driver, and his wife, Norma Jean, who are haunted by the memory of their child, who died in infancy. Complex, compassionate, and poignant, the story became a contemporary classic and is one of the most widely anthologized stories in high school and college textbooks. The book that soon followed, Shiloh and Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reviewing the collection in the New Republic, Anne Tyler described Mason as “a full-fledged master of the short story.” Critics began associating her with a new wave of short fiction emerging in the 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Richard Ford. Reflecting on this period, Mason recalled, “My work was about working-class characters whose inner lives were not often portrayed in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, so this created a stir,” and she began to feel “freer to write about so-called ordinary people, with the conviction that no one, after all, is ordinary.”
She says her style “comes out of a way of hearing people talk.” She has a good ear for ordinary speech, and few authors depict the understated but subtly revealing dialogue of friends, mothers, daughters, and married couples better than she does. She identified with Elvis Presley because he “was so familiar—and he was ours! I don’t remember the controversy he stirred up because everything he did seemed so natural and real, and he was one of us, a country person who spoke our language.” This says something about her impulses as a writer: staying true to a voice, a tonality, and a form of language. “I write in plain straightforward English,” she says, “often in the language and cadences of rural and small-town Kentuckians. I hear the music of their speech, and I feel it conveys their attitudes toward the world. It is in that language that I tell their stories.”
Much of her work deals with war and the grief and trauma that it leaves behind. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times described her first novel, In Country, as “a novel that, like a flashbulb, burns an afterimage in our minds.” It concerns a seventeen-year-old girl, Sam Hughes, whose father died in combat before she was born, and through memories gathered from her taciturn uncle and others she tries to imagine what the experience of Vietnam was really like, as opposed to the fantasies conveyed by TV and movies. When she finally reads her late father’s overwhelmingly blunt, factual war diary, she realizes how many illusions she has nursed for years. The novel begins and closes with a journey to the Vietnam War Memorial, where the splintered, multigenerational family is finally united in grief as they stand before the etching of Sam’s father’s name. As in much of Mason’s work, sprawling suburban and country landscapes are described in pithy detail, including the Howard Johnsons, Country Kitchens, and Exxon gas stations along the interstate. Popular music is everywhere on radios and stereos, from the Doors to Bruce Springsteen, sifted through the sensibility of the narrator, creating a vivid soundscape.
Mason’s world is a place you can see clearly, but it is also a world of feeling. She has an extraordinary eye for detail, as when Leroy in “Shiloh” notices for the first time “the peculiar way goldfinches fly past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch themselves.” Her characters appear with clarity preceding a particularly dramatic revelation, as when Norma Jean is depicted “picking cake crumbs from the cellophane wrapper, like a fussy bird,” just before she declares, unexpectedly, “I want to leave you.” In Nancy Culpepper, Nancy watches her boyfriend during a tense moment at her parents’ dinner table: she “watched him trim the fat from his ham as precisely as if he were using an X-Acto knife on mat board.” Below the surface of the details, there are currents of feeling. When he tries to understand his relationship with the past, at the Shiloh historic battleground, Leroy realizes the limits of his capacity to understand even his own past: “Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history.” It is precisely “the insides of history” and of lived experience that Bobbie Ann Mason recovers in her fiction, portraying with consummate artistry the relationship between the world she observes and her characters’ inner lives, with all their hopes and dreams.