Bobbie Ann Mason is a prize-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, as well as works of nonfiction. She earned a doctorate at the University of Connecticut in 1972, specializing in the works of Vladimir Nabokov. She taught journalism part-time for several years but turned to writing full-time in 1978, publishing her first story in The New Yorker in 1980.

Most often her fiction reflects her experiences of growing up in a small southern town, her youthful desires to escape into the larger world, and her interest in popular culture. Such is the case with In Country, a bildungsroman set in fictitious Hopewell, Kentucky, in 1984.

Using the genre of the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, allows Mason to treat several important, pertinent themes, both classical and contemporary. Among these themes, none is more compelling than the classical search for identity. At the age of seventeen, Sam Hughes is at an important crossroads, eager to move on to life beyond high school and her small town but unsure of how to safely and successfully negotiate the journey. She spends her time assembling the pieces of her life story, filling in the gaps left by her father’s death in Vietnam and trying to understand and make whole the situations of several family members and friends.

Like Telemachus of Homer’s Odyssey, Sam must find out who she is before she can begin her life’s work as a complete human being. To do this she must first know her father. In pursuing her father, she learns the history of the war and the role of the United States in it, thus revealing another important theme: a country trying to understand a controversial war. Her visit to the newly built Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the novel’s end allows Sam to know her father by touching his name on the wall, and allows Mason to represent the awakening consciousness of the United States to the truth of the war.

Part of Sam’s achieving wholeness involves recognizing and reconciling the masculine and feminine aspects of her personality, thus introducing the contemporary theme of gender. For a good part of the novel, Sam seems to run away from her feminine side, as her masculine nickname, her athleticism, and her independence suggest. An even fuller expression of this rejection of her femaleness is evident in her reaction to Dawn’s pregnancy. Sam fears that Dawn will be tied to a boring life of marriage and motherhood in a small town, much as Sam’s mother, Irene, had been. At one point, Sam even advises Dawn to have an abortion.

Sam’s reconciliation with her femaleness and her own potential for motherhood emerges gradually in her attempt to heal her uncle, who has been dysfunctional since his service in Vietnam. She does all that she can to reconnect him to a healthy, full life. This reconciliation seems to reach a climax at Cawood Pond, where, discovered by Uncle Emmett after a night spent trying to penetrate the mystery of the war, she forces him to share some of his own stories and to express his long-restrained anguish. Emmett becomes a new person, leading his niece to the Vietnam Memorial and decisively sending her off to college.

Mason skillfully communicates these themes using a spare, tight style, described by some as dirty realism or minimalism. The novel is replete with pop culture references—brand-name junk foods, fast-food restaurants, television series, MTV—that create the homogenized American landscape of the 1980’s and suggest the disappearance of distinctive, southern small-town life. Images and symbols of decay and disease are everywhere as well, from...