Hood, co-winner of the Flannery Acinar Award for Short Fiction this
year (see Chemin, above), shines brightest with "Inexorable
Progress" - an urban story of a Southern Republican woman's last
desperate days, filled with futile attempts at usefulness, sense,
and identity. Elsewhere, Hood's South is a wilder, more rural
locale: lawless bikers threatening a grandmother and pouty
grandchild; a slain collie revenged. And perhaps the best of her
full, dense narratives is "Solomon's Seal" - about an old couple's
ragged divorce. True, the lushness of Hood's vocabulary and
phrasing sometimes intrudes between subject and narrator. (From
"Inexorable Progress": "That's how it was with Angelina: a tree
stripped to the natural bone, soul-naked in the emptying wind. She
was good at pretending; she hung color and approximations of
seasonal splendor on every limb, and swayed like a bower in the
autumn gales around her, but her heart was hollow, and her nests
empty.") But this is an impressive debut collection nonetheless -
by a writer whose work was one of the standouts in John Updike's
Best American Short Stories anthology (p. 775). (Kirkus Reviews)
Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger,
longing--sometimes worse--lie just below the surface of a pleasant
summer afternoon or a Sunday church service.
In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley
where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby"
and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from
the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide."
But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a
family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind
and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that
made him worth the trouble he caused."
The title story in the collection begins with a visit to clean
the graves in a country cemetery and ends with the terrifying
pursuit of a young girl and her grandmother by two bikers, one of
whom "had the invading sort of eyes the woman had spent her
lifetime bolting doors against."
In the story "Inexorable Process" we see the relentless
desperation of Angelina, "who hated many things, but Sundays most
of all," and in "Solomon's Seal" the ancient anger of the mountain
woman who has crowded her husband out of her life and her heart,
until the plants she has tended in her rage fill the half-acre.
"The madder she got, the greener everything grew."
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