LOVE LIFE: STORIES
Bobbie Ann Mason
New York: Harper & Row, 1989
241 pp., $17.95
She smiled with her gums showing, like Lily Tomlin.
--"Private Lies"
A lot of things have happened since Bobbie Ann Mason's first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), arrived on the literary scene, winning for itself and its author the PEN/Hemingway Award and earning nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, American Book Award, and PEN/Faulkner Award. (In a prize-happy age, one notes that publishers have recently taken to listing near misses in a kind of honors-by-association ploy. From time to time these days you will see books of poetry listed as "Runner-Up for the Pulitzer Prize," an odd claim to fame since every other book considered that did not receive that particular award is a "runner-up.")
Since the undeniable literary splash made by the appearance and reception of Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason has brought out two well-received novels, In Country (1985), which is being translated into film, and Spence + Lisa (1988); and she has reclaimed public credit for her earlier scholarly-critical titles--Nabokov's Garden: A Nature Guide to Ada (1974) and The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters (1975). Her work has received serious critical attention manifested not only in prompt and widespread reviews of her books as they appear, but also in an impressive list of critical pieces about her work and interviews with her. Mason has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and another one from the Pennsylvania (where she lives now) Council on the Arts. Perhaps most important for a good and serious writer seeking to build an audience for her work of fiction in Harper & Row's handsome Perennial Library trade paperback editions. Here are all the signs and symbols of a literary overnight success. It is always a cause for wonder and admiration in America when a new writer has apparently earned attention and audience on the strength of a (first!) collection of short stories.
Evidently, the truth is that it wasn't all that easy. Writing about Mason in "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years," Harper & Row editor Ted Solotaroff makes that point: "Mason spent some seven years writing an unpublished novel, and then story after story, sending each one to Roger Angell at the New Yorker, getting it back, writing another, until finally the twentieth one was accepted." In another place in the same essay he expands on this story:
She began writing fiction in 1971, after she got out of
graduate school, and for the next five years or so wrote in
a desultory way, finding it hard to get focused. In 1976
she finished a novel about a twelve-year-old girl growing
up in western Kentucky who was addicted to Nancy Drew
novels. "I took another two years before I began to find my
true subject, which was to write about my roots and
...
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