[In the following review, Benedict identifies the strengths and weaknesses of Feather Crowns.]

In Feather Crowns, Bobbie Ann Mason once again proves her mastery over the world of specific physical detail. Her previous fiction, both stories and novels, has made frequent unabashed use of brand-name commodities to limn symbolically the narrow dimensions of her characters' lives. Her fascination with mercantile additions to the language—Doritos, Coca-Cola, Pampers, Kleenex—often takes on an incantatory quality, as though the gaudy organization of the supermarket shelf has subsumed the role of religious liturgy, or of poetry.

This latest novel, set for the most part on a tobacco farm in western Kentucky in 1900, invokes a litany of the brand names of that era, but to substantially different effect. Scott's Carbolated Salve, Vegetine Blood purifier, Turkish Pile Ointment, Dr. Koenig's Hamburg Breast Tea: These are not nostrums on which the Wheelers, provincial farmers, depend. Rather, the products in the town's stores and on advertising cards stand as signs to them, harbingers of a commercial world gathering strength beyond the boundaries of their communal, hardscrabble lives.

When that immoderate world invades the Wheelers' land, as it inevitably must, the life of the farm is irretrievably changed. For the worse? “Don't ever think we lived in the good old days,” Christianna Wheeler, the novel's protagonist, warns her grandchild in the book's closing pages. “It was good in some ways, but it was a misery in the heart so much of the time for so many.” All times are an impenetrable mix of good and ill, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to try to sort them out one from the other. The book's very title presents the reader with a paradoxical image: feather crowns, nestlike structures of woven plumage that sometimes form in down pillows, can be taken to symbolize either the impending death of the pillow's owner, or the certainty of his accession into Heaven.

The novel opens with a long series of chapters describing the supremely uncomfortable pregnancy of Christianna Wheeler and her subsequent delivery of quintuplets, the first known to have been carried to full term in North America. Mason draws the particulars of life on the farm with impressive, almost uncanny, authority. She knows the Wheelers with the intimacy of a family member, from the fern design of their butter molds to the fact that James Wheeler whistles while plowing to keep his mule team entertained. It is a transcendant act of imagining the past. Strangely, Feather Crowns is at its weakest in these introductory sections, as though the accurate details have overpowered the other considerations of the novel, most noticeably plot. The book doesn't really begin to move until a hundred or more pages in.

Once it gets rolling, the novel's narrative unfolds along pleasing and unconventional lines. Christianna's quints bring her instant fame. Notoriety draws with it crowds of persistent gawkers, who pester the family night and day, threatening the security of their relationships while promising ever-elusive prosperity. Confrontations with these pilgrims from the nearby town of Hopewell, and later from large cities, provide opportunity for the expression of one of the book's strongest and most cogent conflicts: that between the urban and the rural. Christianna chafes under the patronizing attentions of her doctor and a woman to whom she owes money, both from town. It irks her that a St. Louis newspaper describes James and herself as “a simple country woman and her yeoman farmer husband.” Christianna is in truth far from simple. She is smart and inquisitive and, as far as the tenor of the times will admit, sexually adventurous, though even she fears that her enthusiasm for intercourse has shown up in her outlandish fecundity.

The book careens from absurdity to tragedy and back again, through adventures too numerous and too astonishing to diminish by brief description, without ever losing sight of the frailty and appealing humanity of its characters. No one, least of all the highly likeable Christianna, is spared the discerning and critical narrator's eye. Though she follows the dictates of her own relentless conscience, her judgment is far from flawless, and she takes an active part in the horrors that plague her once she has left the sheltering, suffocating borders of the Wheeler homeplace.

The book's final chapter serves as an epilogue. In 1963, on her ninetieth birthday, Christianna describes the independence and even happiness that she has found despite the catastrophes of her early days; or rather through them. Her life has become no easier, but ease is not the point, no matter what modernity tells us. She musters the grit to refuse the organizers of a Hopewell gala planned in her honor, saying that she is “just an old country woman and wouldn't know how to act in town,” not with her former humility or embarrassment, but with a gratifying and wholly unfashionable pride.