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While these two books tread familiar ground, their path is still important

by Jeanne McDonald

Silas House, a rural mailman in Lily, Kentucky, population 800, has the perfect name for a southern writer, the perfect publishing house, and the perfect plot: Clay Sizemore, orphaned at age four when his mother is murdered, spends his youth searching for pieces of her life in order to stitch together her complete history. He grows up, falls in love with a forbidden woman, and ends up committing murder himself.

In Clay's Quilt (Algonquin, $21.95), House enlists traditional elements of the quintessential southern novel to craft his story: violence, fundamentalist religion, attachment to the land, rural roots, history, strong family ties. His rural Kentucky characters have a dignity that is almost elegant in its straightforward simplicity, although, there is, of course, the occasional bad apple. Poverty, hard-scrabble lives and bootleg whiskey see to that. But most of Clay's family are moored by their spiritual heritage and an old mountain code of ethics. Like Easter, for example, his mother's sister, who looks forward to the day when Jesus will "part the clouds and come after His Children. 'Rapture,' she called it, and the word was always whispered.".

Critics of southern literature say the Southern novel continues to be popular just because Southerners want it to be, because they are always perpetuating the myth of the South, which begs the question: How has Southern literature changed over the past 40 or 50 years? If the plots and elements remain the same, what exactly has changed?

Well, in Clay's Quilt, instead of the old folk songs and country dances we read about in the old Southern novels, Silas House's characters dance the Texas two-step in honky-tonks and listen to the music of Lucinda Williams, John Mellencamp, and Tom Petty. They chain-smoke cigarettes and drink Jim Beam instead of bootleg whiskey. They have their photos taken at Olan Mills and shop at Wal-Mart. And although the interstate has brought the rest of the world closer to Crow County, Kentucky, where Clay lives, Kentucky highways are still governed by the configuration of the mountains that surround them. House's characters might use those roads to venture into the next county, but they rarely go much farther, because even though their financial and educational circumstances sentence them to live in doublewides and work as truck drivers and coal miners, they're held captive more by their devotion to the land than by economic factors. "There is a cool that sometimes comes down over the mountains in the evening," writes House. "The peach light stands like steam along the horizon, changing the shape of things.... Mist seeps out of the jagged cliffs."

Maybe this Southern story has been told too many times. Passion, murder, revenge, redemption, all served up with a Southern accent. But as long as there are Southerners, we will continue to enjoy this particularly unique kind of literary heritage.

Ron Ellis' memoir, Cogan's Woods, (Pruett Publishing, $21.95) is also about Kentucky, but the pace is much slower, almost dreamlike. The story, a series of reminiscences, is a paean to Ellis' father. The book revolves around the annual squirrel-hunting expeditions father and son made together to Cogan's Woods, 207 acres in Belden County, Kentucky, in the 1960s. Over the years, as the pair returns to that hallowed place, the son learns lessons about life, history, family, nature, and above all, about himself. "Years later," writes Ellis, "sitting in a deer stand on a cold November morning and looking out over a cedar thicket, I would be reminded of those days spent in Cogan's Woods with my father as I looked down at my young son sitting next to me, bundled in wool and down, his head resting against my arm so as to sleep some before the dawn brought the excitement of the first deer hunt. I wept quietly in the darkness because of the painful images I had now of my own father's imminent death. Only days earlier he was able to gather his strength to raise himself on one elbow, extend his other hand to me, and repeat out of the dark in a soft, comforting voice, 'It's important to remember, son. It's so important to remember.'"

In his introduction, writer Rick Bass confirms the declaration. "The act of remembering is a celebration of cherished things—friendship and family, storytelling and nature, the physical senses, and the beauty of permanency existing right next to stunning impermanency. The brevity of such things in any individual's life is all the more reason for noticing them."

This is a quiet book, a book that spins, as Bass puts it, "a riverine sense of narrative, memory, and landscape." And particularly for readers who grew up in similar surroundings, Cogan's Woods creates, above all, the comforting feeling of coming home again.