[In the following mixed review of Spence + Lila, Krist applauds Mason's writing, but wishes the novel was more satisfying.]

[Bobbie Ann Mason's] new short novel Spence + Lila is exactly what we've come to expect of the author of Shiloh, and Other Stories: a simple, straightforward tale of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, told with extraordinary perception and precision. Like Carver, Mason has a turf, and this book finds her again returning to that area of rural western Kentucky she has already made her own. It's a place where the subtle rhythms of farm life blend seamlessly with the loud shimmying of TV, Burger Kings, and rock-and-roll—an amusingly compromised Arcadia that her characters seem to accept as perfectly natural.

The book begins with Spence and Lila Culpepper, Kentucky farmers passing into old age, driving to a hospital to have a gristly knot in Lila's breast investigated. The knot, it turns out, is a malignant tumor, and Lila's breast must be removed; later she must undergo another operation—this one more dangerous—in which the blood vessels to her brain are cleaned of plaque. The book focusses on Lila's reflections in the hospital as she examines her past, her relationship to her husband and three children, and the implications of her own death. Her husband, meanwhile, is going through his own quiet crisis, trying to conceive of life without Lila. Along the way, the various Culpeppers must endure the manifold indignities of modern hospital life.

Does all of this sound familiar? It should, since this is well-trodden ground in contemporary fiction. What distinguishes this book from most other cancer tales, however, are Mason's extraordinary sympathy for her characters and her ability to perform that Carver-like magic of investing surface detail with large doses of emotion and significance. Take this wonderful example: Spence and his dog Oscar are out in the barn feeding the five small Holsteins he is raising for beef. Alone because his wife is in the hospital, he has just been thinking of how one must puncture the yolk of an egg with a fork before putting it into the microwave:

Oscar wags his tail. The calves flick flies with their tails. They amble forward, rubbing each other and gazing at Spence with liquid eyes the texture and size of fried eggs. A horrifying image flashes through his mind—jabbing their eyes with a fork.

What makes this image resonate so deeply is not only the echo of what Spence has just been thinking about microwaving eggs, but also the way in which the image embodies Spence's growing anxiety about the mastectomy his wife is to undergo. This anxiety, like most emotions in minimalist fiction, is never completely articulated, in large part because the character himself is incapable of articulating his own emotions. But it is firmly present in the surface details. This is high art, it seems to me, but art that covers its tracks beautifully.

Having said that, however, I must admit that this book is not entirely satisfying. Mason's painstaking narrative style, while utterly convincing, remains so doggedly at the surface of things that I began to long for a single character—just one—with a full-grown, self-aware consciousness to come along and dive below the hamburger wrappers and tuna casseroles and plastic bowls of Jell-O and come up with something like an insight. Mason, like many talented minimalists, is constantly in danger of biting off less than she can chew. We can only hope that next time she'll take a few more chances and startle us. As it is, she's written a little gem of a novel, but the emphasis is perhaps too heavily on the “little.”