The reviews of The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake have been uniformly reverent: look, we have been told, what a gift shone briefly in our midst. Robert Towers wrote an attentive, generously inclined piece in The New York Review of Books and Joyce Carol Oates went even further in a front-page rave in The New York Times Book Review [see excerpts above]. She found Pancake to be "a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's…." Pancake's reputation, it should be noted, preceeded him; I (and I assume others) had heard mention of his name—it wasn't, obviously, one I was likely to forget—from several magazine and book editors some time before I ever set eyes on this collection: I was prepared to pay attention. Well, I have read the stories and I, at least, found that they don't quite hold up to the acclaim surrounding them. (p. 36)

Pancake came from the foothills of West Virginia and, in spite of the friends he made and recognition he received, appears to have carried an implacable sense of apartness. This I gathered from the accounts by two former teachers, James Alan McPherson and John Casey, which are contained in the foreword and afterword to the book.

The inclusion of two memoirs in so slim a volume is in itself a bit curious, as though the distanced tone of the writing needed to be warmed up by some friendly recollection. Both men apparently helped Pancake a great deal but their affection for him has a reserved note to it. He seems to have needed more than either McPherson or Casey could give, or not to have known how to ask for what they could have provided: solace, understanding, company—"an instant of basic human understanding," as McPherson describes it. The reader learns that Pancake wrote as he drank—hard—and that he both resented and felt attached to the worn terrain that bred him.

These stories, like Pancake himself, don't invite lavish involvement. They are spare, undoubtedly, but they are also pitiless: try and get too close to them and they will rebuff you. Set in the impoverished valleys and towns of West Virginia, the stories are mounted in hard, bleak details. Everything—money, jobs, sex—is in short supply, and nothing yields to the human element, least of all other people. The characteristic point of view is that of a muffledly sensitive male in his twenties who works at a grimy occupation—coalminer, truckdriver, or gas station attendant—and plays at even grimier activities—cockfighting, boxing, foxhunting. These young men, and this is even truer of the women they turn to for love but end up "rutting," have had feelings once; now all they have is the absence of response. The prevailing tone is as impassive as the landscape: "This is how it is," Pancake seems to be saying, "ain't nothin' goin' to change nohow."

The aspect of Pancake's work most singled out for praise has been his handling of detail. And his eye is indeed very clear, although I have doubts about how much it takes in. In the best stories—"Trilobites," "Hollow," "Fox Hunters," "In the Dry"—the details are sharp as stones and are used to puncture any airy sentiments the narrator might have once had. Colly, the dirt-farmer in the first and most accomplished story, "Trilobites," has been the sort of whimsical fellow who could write in his girlfriend, Ginny's, yearbook: "'We will live on mangoes and love.'" Now, however, he feels "like a real fool" for what he wrote and the futility of such dreams is driven home to the reader by the inertness of the physical surroundings and the fearful decision of Colly's widowed mother to sell the family farm. (pp. 36-7)

[Frequently], Pancake's stories begin and end in an atmosphere of quiet fury—more eruptive than depression, and therefore disquieting. The violence is diverted—a woman gets cuffed, a doe is shot and gutted—but it still threatens precisely because it isn't exhausted. This is particularly apparent in one of the more rounded-out stories, "In the Dry," featuring a young scab trucker named Ottie who returns to the droughty valley where he has been raised by a foster family. No one seems pleased to see him after the passage of years: "Law, it's you," his foster mother greets him. Bus, a cousin who has been crippled in a car accident that Ottie was involved in, recognizes him but refuses to do more than blink in acknowledgement. After a furious outburst from his foster father, Old Gerlock, Ottie leaves, stopping first to take care of Old Gerlock's daughter's mute sexual need, expressed by her "gray, waiting" presence. The story is powerful; it suggests a silent screaming, like the "awful noise" the gears of Ottie's truck make as he pulls out into the night.

But too often the underlying anger and depression of Pancake's voice is tiring, even boring. I found myself getting weary of knowing what his characters don't feel; I longed to know what they do feel. His relentlessly laconic style begins to seem imposed; even West Virginia must boast a few chatty types as well as these people who drop a few words in between their pauses. The stories revolving around characters other than standins for Pancake's own don't ring true to me. "A Room Forever" is about a boathand on shore leave who picks up a pubescent prostitute and makes a stab at reaching out to her, which she scornfully rejects. Immediately after this the girl goes out and slits her wrists, which causes the unflappable narrator to muse "how shit always sinks." The schematic misery of this story made me think of those black-hued contributions that appear in high school literary magazines; the insistent pointlessness of its tone ends up evoking no greater interest in the reader than a desire for the story to end.

The depressive in literature has acquired, these past decades, an unimpeachable stature; we respond to it with automatic seriousness. This fact, I imagine, has something to do with the attention conferred upon these stories, whose author looks downward on the book jacket, retreating into the shadow of the lens. I wonder also if Pancake's reviewers, tired of reading fiction about jaded urban couples, weren't drawn in by the unfamiliar form that bleakness takes in the hills of West Virginia. There is an exotic spirit to his stories, almost in spite of themselves, filled as they are with scrappy facts—eating turtle meat, working the face of a coal mine. Still the harsh mystique of this rural Southern life leaves an irrevocably bitter impression. I doubt that many readers will be moved to go back to any of these stories a second time. The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake is a distinctly minor collection with glints of a larger gift. To elevate these modest offerings by hailing them as more than they are is to honor neither the reality of the writer's talent nor of his pain. (p. 37)