Customer Reviews

In the Mountains of America

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(...)In the Mountains of America is a beautifully-written, tender
and clear-eyed collection of short stories set in Appalachia in
which the reader is invited to shed big city ways, and settle
back--way back like the country people who inhabit these mountain
hollows and tales and who enjoy a good story themselves--and to
"just listen. Listen." Meredith Sue Willis's characters are
worth listening to. Distinctive, quick-witted, and touching,
they, like all of us, are searching to make sense of lives
bounded by family, community, geography and social class.
Willis creates dialogue you can hear, details you can see.
In "The Little Harlots," Roy Critchfield, a ninth-grader,
struggles to reconcile "the raw burden of his body" with his
burgeoning desires and his father's strict religious views. "I
don't chew my cud twice," his father snaps at Roy after his
mother leaves home and refuses his father's angry demand to
return. In "The Birds That Stay" the meaning of a young woman's
death is examined through the four voices of her daughter,
grandmother, father, and mother. Jody Otis, the dead woman's
father, mulls violence. He sits in the kitchen glaring at the
passing thick-soled shoes of his daughter's "pit viper" husband,
Buddy, the man he blames for her death, while Ellen Morgan Otis,
the dead woman's mother, wants only "to feel love for all these
fine pople here today grieving with us," understanding by the
story's end that no matter how strong one's desire to affix cause
and blame to life's tragedies, we dwell somewhere between
darkness and beauty, in an "unknown" middle.
This understanding permeates each of these twelve stories.
In the luminous "Family Knots," we follow Narcissa Foy, a
patchwork quilter, from childhood into middle age as she creates
complex quilting patterns that parallel the unexpected
complexities of her own quiet mountain life. As a child,
Narcissa has always liked "the crazy quilts best . . . following
trails of color wherever they led and then later discover[ing]
shapes that contained [her] discovery." Narcissa bears five
children, the next-to-last a difficult labor. Her breasts become
inflamed and she dreams of a quilt "the color of her struggle to
nourish this baby," a quilt with colors that "trickle and form
paths like veins, twisting, weaaving, plaiding, bursting open
like fireworks or zinnias unfurled"--a pattern called Family
Knots. Its creation ushers in a period of Narcissa's limited
recognition as an artist by city collectors. When Narcissa's
college-educated daughter, Lou, implores her to move to the city
and study art--"It will smother your talent, never leaving here,"
insisted Lou--Narcissa wonders "if she had been smothered, and
allowed it was possible that something had been, but something
else had been made strong." Her destiny has been more than
quilts. It has also been raising a family, stitching together
"the pattern of people"--and she, Narcissa, "was in the pattern."
Some of the stories in In the Mountains of America are
long, some short, some dense, others more like yarns. But all
illuminate a kind of double consciousness, the fact that we know
the world by the stories we tell and we know ourselves through
the creation of these narratives. Willis herself is attracted to
tales that reveal how an event, or landscape viewed from one
vantage point (the New York City skyline, the lights, the war in
Vietnam, in "Evenings with Dotson," a wonderful tale of high
school romance revisited) can be perceived as the opposite from
another's point of view--and even from one's own point of view in
another context. With her ancestral roots in Appalachia and a
present-day family life in New York and New Jersey, Meredith Sue
Willis brings a surprisingly convincing optimism and far-reaching
embrace of cultural differences to her readers.