Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104180055
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by O. ALAN WELTZIEN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
About four years ago on this page, I praised "Madonna on Her Back," a fine story debut by Franklin County resident, Alyson Hagy. With her second collection, "Hardware River Stories," I find my enthusiasm abides. If anything, a greater control is demonstrated here. Hardly a stroke seems false in these seven stories.
Readers in our area owe themselves this treat, for four of the stories are set in the Piedmont or Shanandoah Valley. One pictures the gently rolling hills, the stands of deciduous forest alternating with pasture and the gleam of wet red clay. The haunting front cover photograph comes from Danville and the human landscapes - chronicles of misguided love and of thwarted ambition - are just as recognizable. A grotesque element present in some of Hagy's earlier stories has quieted here and been replaced with an insistent note of doom, if not tragedy.
Most of her newer protagonists will struggle hard to survive their experiences of sharp disillusionment or loss. Lute Foss in the title story does not survive. "Hardware River" may well be Hagy's strongest story. It is "country" and it rings authentically true, unfolding with a Faulknerian inevitability. The two longest stories, "The grief is always fresh" and "Kettle of hawks" form close seconds. They present a greater structural complexity and a more ambitious design than some of the other stories.
In the former, some elements of detective fiction - a casual murder, the presence of police and interrogation of the young murderers - serve to anatomize the undoing of a 32-year-old artist whose reporter-husband is away in Nicaragua. In the latter, told in five sections and prefaced with a suggestive explanation of the title, a male relationship based on hard work at a horse farm eventually precipitates into a grim seduction scene.
Indirectly in "Ballad and sadness," and directly in "Kettle of hawks," Hagy explores the fate of homosexuals indulging their desires. In "The field of lost shoes," Hagy used the New Market Battlefield Visitor Center and grounds to plot the final act of an extramarital affair - told sympathetically from the perspective of Marlowe, the young lover.
"Native west" pivots, with fascinating effect, between a Tidewater physician recalling his rural boyhood, and Mrs. Bowman, a wheelchair-bound German Baptist wife and mother who dwells upon the futures of her children. The juxtaposition creates a fine study in contrasting values.
Reading "Hardware River stories" hardly resembles an evening of chamber music or a gourmet meal. Each selection features its own flavor but each sounds or tastes more excellent because of contrasts: memories of what has come before coupled with anticipation of what is to come. Hagy has observed well; her prose shines softly and brightly.
O. Alan Weltzien teaches English at Ferrum College.
by CNB