The American Century: Literature since 1945 595The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), and Digging to America
(2006). But certain preoccupations tend to recur: families and the separations they
suffer through death and through the isolation of one member from another, the
need to live more than a life of quiet desperation, and the desperate fact of truly
living, taking a risk. What these writers share is worth emphasizing, though, for all
their differences. It is something shared with other recent and notable women
writers, among them Ann Beattie (1947–), Gail Godwin (1937–), and Josephine
Humphreys (1944–). “On an afternoon two years ago,” the narrator of Rich in Love
(1988) by Josephine Humphreys declares, as she prepares the reader for the story she
is going to tell, “my life veered from its day-in day-out course and became for a short
while the kind of life that can be told as a story – that is, one in which events appear
to have meaning.” That hits the note all these writers share. All of them reveal, with
gentle intensity, those moments in life – usually shared by a group or community,
perhaps a family – when the familiar suddenly becomes strange. The contours of the
everyday are disrupted, by bereavement maybe or betrayal; and the characters, often
female, are forced to question the assumptions of their lives, to review and revise
accepted notions about their own nature and those dear to them – and to make a
choice about where they stand, even if only quietly to themselves.
One of the most remarkable groups of recent women writers to examine
communities, and especially families, in crisis comes from the South. The group
includes Bobbie Ann Mason (1940–), Lee Smith (1944–), Ellen Gilchrist (1935–),
Dorothy Allison (1950–), Jayne Ann Phillips (1952–), and from an earlier generation,
Ellen Douglas (1921–). Mason is the author of a number of remarkable short stories
(Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)) that show, she says, how she was “haunted by the
people I went to school with.” Working in local dime stores or wrecking yards,
perhaps, or living in rural trailer parks and frequenting shopping malls, her
characters register not only the changes in their own lives but larger transformations
in their culture. Or, as one feisty young woman character tells her father: “Times are
different now, Papa. We’re just as good as the men.” In novels like In Country (1985),
Spence & Lilla (1988), Feather Crowns (1993), and An Atomic Romance (2006),
Mason has continued her sensitive exploration of such people, as they weave their
way between a vanished past, a slippery present, and an uncertain future. In Country,
for instance, show us a young woman trying to come to terms with the death of
her father in the Vietnam War. As she makes her way through “contemporary state-
of-the-art USA” she struggles to set up a channel, a current of sympathy between the
dead and the living, that will enable her to settle accounts with her present, her past,
and move on. In her early stories in Black Tickets (1980), Phillips is similarly
concerned with people trying to make sense of their aimless lives, their world of
broken families, truck stops, strip joints, people on the move. And to do so, they
seem never to cease talking, about their lives and world, to others or themselves.
More ambitiously, in her novels, Machine Dreams (1984), Shelter (1994), Motherkind
(2000), and Lark and Termite (2009), she has woven voices together to tell stories of
death and desire, the subterranean ties that bind one person to others, personality to
history. In Machine Dreams, for instance, she uses voices talking to one anotherGGray_c05.indd 595ray_c 05 .indd 595 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM