[In the following excerpt, Johnson offers a favorable evaluation of By Land, By Sea, though arguing that some of the stories “lapse into melodrama.”]

“The truth is,” Eudora Welty has written, “fiction depends for its life on place.” Her well-known essay, “Place in Fiction,” champions the significance of a story’s setting: “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.” The importance of location, according to Welty, transcends any critical commonplaces about “regional” writing or “verisimilitude.” Referring to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County but also to Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire moors and Flaubert’s French villages, Welty suggests that the mythologized landscape underlying any great novel or story is the primary source of its emotional power. Far from betraying a limited or parochial viewpoint, a clearly defined fictional geography provides the essential grounding for authentic human character and action. In 1972, Welty told an interviewer that she didn’t mind being called a regional writer, since she viewed the notion of regionalism in this larger context: “I just think of myself writing about human beings and I happen to live in a region, as do we all, so I write about what I know—it’s the same case for any writer living anywhere.”

When Ernest Hemingway made his famous remark that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” he was similarly acknowledging the specifically regional character of American fiction since the Civil War. Our country’s distinctive regions and their literary representatives—Twain’s Mississippi river towns, the New England of Sarah Orne Jewett and other local colorists, Hamlin Garland’s Midwest, Bret Harte’s Far West, and most famously the deep South of Faulkner, Welty, and O’Connor—stand at the center of our cultural heritage and exert a powerful influence even today, despite the rapid blurring of America’s regions into a relatively homogenous whole. Discussing her famous story about the Medgar Evers assassination (“Where Is the Voice Coming From?”), Welty suggested that certain social and historical concerns can be discussed accurately only by a writer intimately familiar with both the geographical and moral landscape: “When that murder was committed, it suddenly crossed my consciousness that I knew what was in that man’s mind because I’d lived all my life where it happened. It was the strangest feeling of horror and compulsion all in one. I tried to write from the interior of my own South.” The story, which re-creates convincingly the voice of racial hatred, illuminates a specific regional and historical moment as it simultaneously uncovers a fundamental truth of human nature.

The American South continues to be the best represented of all regions, in terms of both the quality and quantity of fiction by its authors. Four of the five short-story writers reviewed here have staked out their own postage stamps of Southern earth—William Hoffman’s Virginia countryside, Bobbie Ann Mason’s western Kentucky, Bo Ball’s Appalachian hollows, and Lewis Nordan’s Mississippi Delta towns—while the fifth, Reginald McKnight, writes of black Americans who have spread across the globe but are united in what might be termed a region of consciousness. Of all the classic American regions, the South, even in its much-publicized manifestations as the “New South,” has perhaps clung most stubbornly to its identity. Its writers have enjoyed the richest imaginable literary heritage, one that can be disabling as well as inspiring, but which guarantees special attention to any “new voice” that bears a recognizably Southern accent.

William Hoffman’s By Land, by Sea is set mostly in rural Virginia and in towns along the Chesapeake Bay. In this colorful, sparely written collection, human beings and their environment are intimately related, envisioned as inseparable and mutually enriching (or, fairly often, mutually defeating) partners in an ongoing and inescapable symbiosis. Hoffman focuses on two major themes. One is this relationship between humankind and a frequently intractable Nature, as in “Cuttings,” which tells of a man’s struggle to fell an enormous oak tree, and “A Question of Rain,” wherein a congregation prevails upon a reluctant minister to initiate a communal prayer for rain in the midst of a long drought. The second theme is the social conflict arising between the fundamentalist values of country folk and the more liberal, “sophisticated” morality of the college-educated and city-bred. This conflict is typified by “Moorings,” in which a wealthy Norfolk couple moves to the bay area and quickly provokes mistrust among the locals. “The young couple wont our people, not just clothes or tongue,” observes the narrator, Josie, who watches helplessly as her husband surrenders to the couple’s undeniable glamour and sexual allure.

Most of Hoffman’s stories are distinguished by strong plots, sharply defined characters, and a hard-edged yet supple prose style that evokes both the beauty and harshness of his region. His paragraphs are notably brief, seldom longer than eight printed lines; this stylistic habit prevents self-indulgent natural or emotional description and suggests the general principle of restraint that governs Hoffman’s writing. It also suggests a habit of observation that is shrewdly contained and concentrated, and that gives many of these tales the resonating power of small fables. Often reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s work, they suggest the preeminence of fate, at once magisterial and indifferent as it controls both human beings and nature, and brings them into frequent collision. Perhaps the most eerily beautiful story is “Landfall”: an elderly man and his dying wife sail deliberately northward, along New England and finally the Canadian coast, seeing their final destiny “in the court of the gods—majestic, white-robed divines, who loomed with resplendent grace on a tossing, steel blue sea.”

Although Hoffman’s notable strength is his bold, at times quasi-allegorical juxtaposition of elemental human passions and natural forces—notable especially at a time when pretentiously vague and indeterminate narrative is the fashion—he does, on occasion, lapse into melodrama, particularly in such stories as “Lover” and “Moorings,” whose violent endings are intended to shock the reader but instead merely strain his credibility. Scenes of lurid violence or sexual passion, common in certain other contemporary writers, are simply not Hoffman’s forte. Rather, his best work achieves power through its narrative simplicity. One fine example is “Indian Gift,” a taut drama of moral conflict involving a small-time farmer who, sacrificing to send his son to the University of Virginia, is seduced by a local huckster into buying a stolen tractor. In “Faces at the Window” and “Altarpiece,” Hoffman tells of a divorcée and a widower, respectively, who struggle between a desire to maintain social decorum and emotional safety, and sudden opportunities to renew their lives as passionate and sexual beings. Such stories exemplify Hoffman’s skill—evident throughout most of this collection—at rendering individual lives caught up in forces that have moved beyond their recognition and control. …

Like the best work of Hoffman, Mason, Ball, and McKnight, Lewis Nordan’s collection extends the tradition of American regional writing without, for the most part, lapsing into slavish imitation of such formidable predecessors as Twain and Faulkner. Although the stories of Mississippi River life and of Yoknapatawpha County must reverberate powerfully in the minds of any regional writers, especially if they are Southern, all five of these authors provide a unique angle of vision on a nation which is only the sum of its variegated postage stamps of earth. When their work succeeds, the reason is not that they focus upon regional concerns but that, to borrow Nordan’s phrase, each has conveyed the “wonderful geography” of his own imagination.