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🦋 Out of the Mountains

From time to time Elvissa Mackey Lipitz Stein has a dream in which she and her husband and children, and his children by his first wife, and Robert and his parents and wife, and Elvissa's parents and her brother, and a whole crowd of Steins and Mackeys and Lipitzes and Critchfields, all go up on Critchfield Mountain to celebrate an open-air meal under a pink sky.... Elvissa always wakes from the dream with a gratifying sense that everything fits together. She never remembers exactly how it fits, but she has a profound belief that it does fit, and that the most important thing in the world is that she knows.

Out of the Mountains has a feeling of memoir about it -- you get the sense that Willis' narrator is telling her own stories and the stories of people familiar to her. And indeed in the afterword, she acknowledges that some of the stories are taken from her life. The sense of intimacy and familiarity with her characters is one of the primary reasons I'm recommending the book -- getting inside people's heads this way is a favorite part of the reading experience for me. The other main thing I loved about the book was its structure, which reminded me a bit of Annie Proulx' Bad Dirt -- you meet the same characters and the same families sprawled out across different parts of Appalachia and of America, from the early 20th Century up to the early 21st. It's a broad scope for such a short book -- and I'm not meaning to say the book is encyclopædic -- but it really works, really gives you a sense of the vastness of the well of experience from which Willis' characters' particular experiences are drawn.

posted morning of Saturday, October 9th, 2010
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