Customer Reviews

Nancy Culpepper: Stories

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This weekend, I read and finished two beautiful books, both fiction: Nancy Culpepper, by Bobby Ann Mason, and Forgetfulness, by Ward Just, both published in 2006.

Nancy Culpepper is a set of short stories about the protagonist, augmented by a novella about her parents, Spence + Lila (first published in the 80s --I loved when it first came out).

Nancy is from Kentucky. Her parents, Spence and Lila, are hard-scrabble farmers who eventually do better with a small dairy farm. Until her grandmother dies --the first forty-one years of their married life-- Spence and Lila live with or close to her grandmother, never traveling.

Nancy married an easterner, a photographer named Jack. They live in Cambridge MA and later somewhere rural in Pennsylvania. Later, when they separate, they move around.

The book is about Nancy's dance: between her country roots and her love of her parents on the one side and her eastern education (Radcliffe, I think --I don't want to hunt it up right now), tastes and manners.

The first three short stories, written in the 80s and early 90s, are wonderful. Spence + Lila is a gem --it narrates Lila's stay in the hospital for a mastectomy and an operation on one of her carotid arteries, but it's really about love, family, acceptance and spunk. It reminds you of feelings within your own family that you have but seldom or never articulate. It also reminds you that love doesn't have to be articulate to be felt.

The final short stories --there are two or three-- are good but not as good as the first ones. But it doesn't make a difference.

Mason's stories capture an engaging personality striving to make sense and gain pleasure from a life that has its share of stresses and disconnects but is ultimately self-affirming. Mason's view of life is intensely local and real, but ultimately benevolent. She writes about *connection. It's a lovely book.

(I reviewed Mason's Feather Crowns for Library Journal when it came out and loved it. Her collection of short stories, Shiloh, is superb. Her novel, In Country, evoked the best performance Bruce Willis ever gave when it was translated --fairly faithfully-- into a movie.)

David Keymer
Modesto, CA

Bobbie Ann Mason is a so-called regional writer because she writes what she knows well. This is sometimes ecstatic, sometimes ordinary, sometimes painful. Mason is an artist because she does not publish a tale, long or short, before she has found its focal point, its potential for epiphany. In sculpting her focal points she augments memory with probing imagination, which takes her into the heart of the human condition.

The volume Nancy Culpepper collects previously published stories and a novella together with two new stories. The first, longish, is a fine study of the American Dream (you can be a millionaire!) as it actually plays out. The second, one of Mason's best stories ever, drives toward an insight that unites the earlier pieces while suggesting a way readers can sort out their own lifelong losses and gains. It's the reason this volume works so well.

Nancy Culpepper is as close as Bobbie Ann Mason has come (in fiction) to autobiography. If "On the Eve" is clearly by Turgenev, not his character Elena, Nancy Culpepper is definitely by Bobbie Ann Mason. This plays out beautifully in passages like the description (p.222) of Nancy's musings while gazing into the mirror. Such passages invite us to enjoy the story at hand while offering ways any reader can enrich life without knowing precisely what the "goal of life" is.