Clear Springs

March 29, 1999
Readers of Mason's fiction may have wondered whether the white, working class, small-town Kentucky she depicts is real or "made up." This memoir makes clear that her work is deeply rooted in her own experience. When Mason first left Clear Springs to attend college, she felt ashamed of being from the South, fearing that people might see her as "a walking, mute mannequin of Southern Gothic horror in high heels and a beehive--or worse, a baton twirler with a police dog." Gradually, she learned to accept her roots; this book is a loving embrace of that place and its people and a richly textured portrait of a rapidly disappearing way of life. However, those looking for deep psychological insight will not find it here. Nor will this memoir make Mason's family stop speaking to her: her attitude is that of an appreciative and respectful daughter. Although not all the characters are angelic, she finds reasons, if not justification, for even the alternately weak and controlling behavior of the mother-in-law who nearly ruined her beloved mother's life. In the first half of the book, Mason uses luxurious, larruping (Kentuckian for good enough to eat) language to evoke the sounds, taste, smells and sights of early childhood. In the second, weaker part, Mason helps her aging mother, Christy, move off the family farm into town, asks her questions and listens to her silences, hints and memories, out of which Mason constructs a version of how her mother, grandmother and great grandparents may have experienced various events in their lives. The resulting narrative, a somewhat tentative mixture of fiction and social history, is still compelling, but the prose never quite gels. Though Mason's strong grounding makes this memoir absorbing, it also prevents it from taking off in a risky, free-floating flight.

January 1, 1999
Why the noted author left Clear Springs, KY--and why she returned.

March 1, 1999
For readers with a taste for the high triumphs and the high--preferably scandal-choked--tragedies of American life, Mason's memoir may not do. For others, though, it should prove to be a worthy read. Mason's life does offer some familiar plotlines, such as the country-to-city tale: the move from a relatively uneducated, relatively poor, very small town in Kentucky to one of the largest and most cosmopolitan locales on the planet, New York City. And she does end with a return home, triumphant, if you will, insofar as the movie version of her successful novel is premiering. But Mason reveals ambivalence toward what the intervening years have done for her town, noting, among other things, that the chicken-processing plant's architecture seems unrelievedly functional. Like the best of memorirists, Mason does not attempt to close all circles or to separate out the good and the bad; she poses questions that linger. As she rediscovers back in Clear Springs what it was like to be immersed in the strange particulars of nature, she wonders why nature wasn't ultimately satisfying, why she lost interest in it. Elsewhere, she wonders why her mother never left. And as she reflects on her parents' concern with working the farm in the years ahead and their undoubted frustration with having a girl, she wonders, Were they so hopeful of a son they hadn't even thought of a girl's name? ((Reviewed March 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)