[In the following review, Jersild discusses the characterizations in Spence + Lila and Love Life. Jersild asserts that protagonists in Mason's fiction rely on the physical details of their lives to keep them grounded, but tend to remain disconnected from their feelings.]

It was seven years ago, in 1982, that Bobbie Ann Mason published Shiloh, and Other Stories, her first collection of short fiction. Except for some nitpicking reviews which complained that Mason was female, wrote in the present tense, and published in the New Yorker (qualifications apparently comprising a genre), the critical reception of that volume was noisy and positive; critics saw in Mason a newcomer who showed not only promise but also maturity of vision and technique. Since then, she has published two short novels, In Country (1985) and Spence and Lila (1988), and now, a collection of stories called Love Life.

In Shiloh, Mason introduces us to the people who remain her focus: the country folk of western Kentucky, people just past the old ways and into the new, just off the farms and into the factories, caught between the garden and the “Burger Boy.” She writes about truck drivers and supermarket clerks and carpenters, real estate agents and teachers. The details of their lives are perfect, as they should be—this is where Bobbie Ann Mason grew up. Indeed, in some of the stories I felt I could see the shadow of a little girl playing in the corner; one imagines, anyway, that such rightness of dialogue and precision of imagery could have come only from an insider.

Yet Mason maintains a rather distanced authorial stance; she, with the reader, looks into her characters' living rooms and watches them as they reveal themselves. It's a pretty funny show, most of the time, as Mason zeros in on the foibles and eccentricities of ordinary folks. She knows about how widows arrive at card parties “in separate cars, not trusting each other's driving,” and she knows that at least one widow would refuse to sit at a table set on a bulldozer sprocket, “for fear she will catch her foot in one of the holes at the base” (19). Humor and pleasure inhere in the simple feeling that the language is just right, that one of these widows would say, “Stephanie comes from a kind of disturbed family. Her mother's had a bunch of nervous breakdowns and her daddy's a vegetarian” (30).

To me, one of the more poignant features of these stories is how amiably the characters go along with the changing times which leave them so bewildered. They rarely argue with or protest against change, and they waste precious little time on nostalgia. Rather, they seem eager to demonstrate that they are keeping up. They, too, have microwaves and know about newfangled diseases. It is a truth self-evident that the new and the young are better than the used and the old, the storebought better than the homegrown. A carpenter who makes a table for his wife to commemorate their twenty-first anniversary—and fashions the top out of twenty-one odd shapes of wood—feels obliged to apologize: “It's not something you would buy in a store” (18). The old people sometimes feel distressed by shifting norms, but they rarely object, partly because they feel helpless, but also because they admire “this day and time, [when] people just do what they please” (29). The young people get divorced, the even younger get abortions, and lots of them smoke dope.

Still, the puzzlement of young and old is always evident, and the fear of meaninglessness—always pervasive in cultures unsettled by change—rustles through these stories like wind in a grassy field. In “The Rookers,” a daughter home from college provides her parents with a metaphor for their anxiety from quantum mechanics:

“There's some things called photons that disappear if you look for them. Nobody can find them.”

“How do they know they're there, then?” asks Mack skeptically.

“Where do they go?” Mary Lou asks.

… “If you try to separate them, they disappear. They don't even exist except in a group. Bob says this is one of the most important discoveries in the history of the world. He says it just explodes all the old ideas about physics.”

(27)

Later, the mother thinks about how her family has scattered, and she muses, “If you break up a group, the individuals could disappear out of existence” (29).

In the face of this anxiety, Mason's characters rely on physical facts—the sound of a drill, the pictures on a table—to prove to themselves that they are still alive. The load of sensory detail by which the author locates us in time and place also suggests the means by which her characters attempt to define themselves, to anchor themselves to their lives. Here, I think, is where Hemingway most strongly makes himself felt in contemporary fiction. In his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” for instance, a shell-shocked soldier goes on a camping trip and tries to steady himself by taking in one detail at a time, registering it with his senses, and using each successful transaction with reality to pull himself along a little further. In Bobbie Ann Mason's stories, characters also feel reassured by the physical world, only now they rely not on grasshoppers under stones but on factory-waxed congoleum floors to measure how real they are—that is to say, how closely their lives approximate the image of modern life they carry around in their heads. When Mason's characters watch TV—and they do a lot of that—they watch shows like Real People, and the irony is not to be missed. Advertising and television become a major frame of reference; their own lives become important to the extent that they identify with movie stars and sit-com characters.

Mason's men can be especially detached from their emotional centers. In the title story of Shiloh, Leroy, a thirty-four-year-old truck driver home after an accident, suspects that his wife is falling away from him. After avoiding the topic of their baby's death for sixteen years, he recalls the incident. He and Norma Jean had gone to a drive-in movie, and the infant died while sleeping in the back seat:

“It just happens sometimes,” said the doctor, in what Leroy always recalls as a nonchalant tone. Leroy can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the President of the United States was talking in a folksy voice on the hot line to the Soviet premier about the bomber accidentally headed toward Russia. He was in the War Room, and the world map was lit up. Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was. Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers are always changing.

(5)

Leroy makes a connection between the doctor's “nonchalant tone” and the “folksy voice” of the president in the movie as he informs the Russians that they are about to be blown up—an association the more touching because it is unconscious. The movie provokes a bizarre sense of unreality. (What does a “War Room” have to do with a war? Or a lit-up “world map” with exploding cities? What does any of it have to do with political actualities?) Indeed, its very incongruousness expresses Leroy's sense of disconnection: he remembers the movie but not the child. In the hospital, he forgets his relation to his wife. His reflex is to move quickly from the painful recollection of this moment to a generalization which might help him make sense of the experience: “Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus,” but “Nobody knows anything.” Hidden in this passage is Leroy's anger at these strange, removed authorities: these careless doctors, folksy presidents, and fickle scientists who seem to have power over Leroy. Yet Leroy is as much removed from his anger as from his sense of loss. Life is out of his control. He is helpless. So it's best to go along as best he can.

Some critics have charged that Mason condescends to her characters, that she portrays them as confused, uneducated, lower-middle-class types who are trapped in their pain because they don't have the tools to understand their dilemmas, while she and the reader look on with superior understanding. Certainly Mason often writes about the confused and uneducated, but I do not believe that she implies a causal relation between emotional clumsiness and social class. It seems to me that respect for other people—including fictional characters—has something to do with letting go of one's own standards and bias long enough to understand them in their own context, with their particular conflicts and specific ways of seeing the world. Mason tends to refrain from comment, extrapolations, conclusions. She rarely appears to identify with her characters or to invite identification. She simply lets them be.

This cool surface can make it hard to engage with her stories. Still, one of their common features is a movement toward a character's moment of realization, when the self is, however briefly, acknowledged and confirmed in its suffering. These moments, always beautifully accomplished, create a sense of kinship with the characters and render them suddenly more complex. The revelations at the end of each story often throw certain preceding details into a context that reveals the intrinsic shape of the whole.

Published in 1985, In Country explores much the same world encountered in Shiloh, this time from the point of view of a seventeen-year-old girl named Sam. With its jaunty high spirits, the novel entertains from the beginning. Here is Sam taking her grandmother to the bathroom at a gas station:

The restroom is locked, and Sam has to go back and ask the boy for the key. The key is on a ring with a clumsy plastic Sunoco sign. The restroom is pink and filthy, with sticky floors. In her stall, Sam reads several phone numbers written in lipstick. A message says, “The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream.” She wishes she had known that one when she took algebra. She would have written it on an assignment.

Mamaw lets loose a stream as loud as a cow's. This trip is crazy. It reminds Sam of that Chevy Chase movie about a family on vacation, with an old woman tagging along. She died on the trip and they had to roll her inside a blanket on the roof of the station wagon because the children refused to sit beside a dead body. This trip is just as weird.

(4)

Like other Mason characters, Sam's first points of reference are TV and movies. A baby when her father was killed in Vietnam, she feels no sense of bereavement until, years later, she watches an episode of M*A*S*H in which Colonel Blake gets killed. She lives with her Uncle Emmett, who, unlike her father, returned from the war alive. Her mother has moved to Lexington with a new husband and baby; Sam refuses to go because “Somebody had to watch out for Emmett” (24), and she doesn't want to switch schools her senior year. More to the point, Sam feels the burden of being cut off from her past, and tries, through her uncle, to reestablish a sense of connection. Together they listen to sixties music and watch M*A*S*H reruns—media versions of history—and Sam spends much of the novel obsessing over whether the acne on Emmett's face is a sign of exposure to Agent Orange.

What Sam wants is a context in which to define herself. She is caught between her desire to make sense of herself in terms of the past and the impulse to make herself new—to cut loose, drive off somewhere, get a job and find “all new friends” (190). While less compelling than the short stories, In Country is more hopeful; in the end, Sam achieves an exhilarating, fresh idea of herself while visiting the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., a self taking shape in spite of the dissolution—cultural, familial—in evidence everywhere she looks.

Spence and Lila is something altogether different. About a farm couple married for over forty years, the novel is in many ways an idyll, a look at the mythic past from which Mason's contemporary characters have fallen. The landscape is still one of change—marijuana plants grow up amid the cornfields, the children have scattered with problems of their own, and Spence and Lila face their own mortality when they discover that Lila has breast cancer. Yet Spence and Lila as a couple represent that time when life seemed to hold together, when husband and wife moved from love to work and back again with the ease that comes from knowing both are always there, and that they are needed.

The novel celebrates, indirectly, a time when families transcended the animosities that divide many of them today. In the hospital, between operations, Lila remembers being a young wife and mother living with Spence's parents while he was in the navy. When her child caught pneumonia, Lila wanted to take her to the doctor, but her in-laws protested, “Why, he would charge! We can doctor her” (26). Lila wrapped the baby's chest in greased rags and “prayed so hard she was almost screaming.” The baby survived, and gradually, the “shared silent worry about Spence” drew Lila and her in-laws together until she loved them “as though they were her own” (27).

Perhaps this is less than convincing. Indeed, authentic as moments in Spence and Lila may be, they disappoint if read too literally—that is, as realistic drama. But this would be a mistake. I read the novel as a modern pastoral, a rendition of the bucolic past written by someone who belongs to a newer world—like Virgil dreaming his idyll from the heights of Roman sophistication or Robert Frost, with his college education, inventing a region of the mind that supposedly exists somewhere north of Boston. Mason's idealizations, likewise, say less about the past itself than about the modern longing for a life in harmony with nature, a time and place where one's work provided satisfying metaphors of self in relation to the world.

Lila, for instance, is a gardener; she tends her garden with love and devotion, and it, in turn, nurtures her in body and spirit. The novel ends with Spence and Lila standing amid the vegetables. “I've got a cucumber that needs pickling,” Spence teases her. He goes on:

The way she laughs is the moment he has been waiting for. She rares her head back and laughs steadily, her throat working and her eyes flashing. Her cough catches her finally and slows her down, but her face is dancing like pond water in the rain, all unsettled and stirring with aroused possibility.

(175–76)

Similarly, some of the most beautiful passages in the novel describe Spence on his farm; he is a gentle caretaker, an uneducated but wise old man who understands his place in the world. Here he is as he “follows the creek line down toward the back fields”:

In the center of one of the middle fields is a rise with a large, brooding old oak tree surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briers. From the rise, he looks out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world—it contains everything there is to know or possess, yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there is—just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple they are almost impossible to grasp.

(132)

It's a great risk to write a novel like Spence and Lila, to put into words facts “so simple they are almost impossible to grasp.” Mason pulls it off by the sheer lyricism of her prose, the earthy humor of her characters, and the uncanny way she has of tracking surprising turns of thought. I was especially moved by Spence's vivid flashbacks to World War II and the way they haunt him throughout the novel. The impossibility of making sense of that time—of figuring out how “his destroyer fit in the larger picture, a whole world at war” (78)—accentuates the beauty of the life he makes for himself with Lila on the farm.

Many of the stories in Love Life are familiar as extensions of themes discovered in Shiloh. The characters exhibit the same difficulty with the process of translating feeling and thought into purposeful action. Desire becomes a vague and unsettling impulse, but desire for what? More money? More sex? More love? A new dress? Mostly, the characters don't know what they want, and so what the businessman says in the story “Sorghum” sounds ruefully true: “Everybody's always dissatisfied” (209).

They have different ways of distancing themselves from the pain of their longing. The old lady of the title story drinks peppermint schnapps and watches TV to forget the risks she never took—like driving off to Idaho in a shiny Imperial with a man whose beard was too “demanding” (12). In “Midnight Magic,” a young man's dislocation from himself approaches schizophrenia. The story begins:

Steve leaves the supermarket and hits the sunlight. Blinking, he stands there a moment, then glances at his feet. He has on running shoes, but he was sure he had put on boots. He touches his face. He hasn't shaved.

(19)

Steve's metaphor of self becomes a car, “deep blue and wicked. … The car's rear end is hiked up like a female cat in heat. Prowling in his car at night, he could be Dracula” (19). There's a rapist on the loose in “Midnight Magic,” and by the end of the story, through some wonderfully eerie turns, we begin to wonder if Steve is forgetting far more than we had realized.

There are stories of healing here, too. In “Bumblebees,” a story with rich and beautiful images, two women, Barbara and Ruth, buy a farmhouse intending to restore it together, one to get over a divorce, the other to recover from the death of her husband and child. Their attempts to mother each other, to nurture their gardens and Barbara's daughter seem doomed from the start. On the other hand, the rot and decay of the old place suggest in themselves the potential for renewal, and Barbara, at least, determines not to shrink from the painful process of making changes. The story ends with her daughter touching a match to a bundle of disintegrating stockings that she finds in the attic:

In the damp air, the flame burns slowly, and then the rags suddenly catch. The smell of burning dust is very precise. It is like the essence of the old house. It is concentrated filth, and Allison is burning it up for them.

(115)

The more I read Mason's stories, the more I am impressed by her natural sense of metaphor, the organic shape of her stories, and the richness of her language. The more, also, I feel the depressive effect of much of her work. Why should this be? Artful stories about grueling circumstances can, of course, leave one elated—that's one of the great paradoxes of art. The feeling one is left with depends largely, I think, on authorial stance; the artist's genius (in the sense of the word as spirit) determines the final effect. It seems to me that Bobbie Ann Mason's authorial restraint mirrors her characters' distance from emotion and produces a certain numbing effect. A huge burden of feeling stays often at arm's length, as if it would be too difficult to take it on entirely, as if Mason herself prefers to keep it at a distance. Thus the sense of helplessness and defeat that occasionally threatens the reader as well as Mason's characters.

Not all of her characters are quite so cut off from feeling, of course. “Coyotes” is a beautiful story about a young man, Cobb, who has become acutely sensitive to other people's pain—noticing, for instance, “how people always seemed to be explaining themselves. If his stepfather was eating a hamburger, he'd immediately get defensive about cholesterol, even though no one had commented on it” (166). He falls in love with a girl named Lynette “who made him feel there were different ways to look at the world. She brought out something fresh and unexpected in him. She made him see that anything conventional … was funny and absurd” (164).

But Lynette has her fears. She is afraid that she will commit suicide because her mother did, the past inexorably gathering her in its tragic web. She asks Cobb, rather daringly, “Do you have any idea how complicated it's going to be?” He reassures her, “Down here, we just call that taking care of business” (179). Both characters recognize the potential for pain ahead of them, and they know that one day they may regret how close they have become. “But he couldn't know that now,” Mason writes of Cobb. Here, as in “Bumblebees,” she admires the simple braveries of characters who, with a rich sense of ambiguity, still direct themselves toward the future. These stories give Love Life some momentum and make the reader care, too, about where Bobbie Ann Mason might go from here.