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Zigzagging down a Wild Trail: Stories

Name: Zigzagging down a Wild Trail: Stories
Author: Bobbie Ann Mason
ISBN: 9780375760617

by Bobbie Ann Mason

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Overview

In this remarkable book, the author of Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and other award-winning books gives us powerful new stories that capture the restless energy of life in contemporary America. The characters here are travelers and seekers, feeling their way toward, or away from the defining moments of their lives. They roam out into the world to England, Alaska, Texas, Saudi Arabia, or ricochet back home to Kentucky, ceaselessly searching, exploring, testing for limits.

I felt strange, says Chrissy in With Jazz, as though all my life I had been zigzagging down a wild trail to this particular place. In Charger, a teenage boy races along the interstate, seeking the father who abandoned him years before. In Rolling into Atlanta, a young woman searches for the kind of authenticity she remembers from her rural childhood. In Proper Gypsies, Nancy deals with the shock of being robbed in London. In The Funeral Side, Sandra comes home to try to fulfill her responsibilities to her family, but yearns to escape again to Alaska and the northern lights that haunt her. Writing in the spare, precise, beautifully nuanced language for which she is famous, Bobbie Ann Mason expands her art here in dramatic and illuminating fashion.

These fascinating stories bring to life surprising individuals whose journeys shine a bright light on life as it is lived by many Americans today. Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail is a beautiful book by one of America's finest writers, a book full of drama, humor, and startling insights into the timeless longings of the human heart.

From the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis

Wall Street Journal

Sitting down with one of these stories may well be the next best thing to going home again.

About the Author, Bobbie Ann Mason

Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of books, including the short-story collection Shiloh and Other Stories (available from Modern Library Paperbacks), the novel In Country, and a memoir, Clear Springs, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is Writer-in-Residence at the University of Kentucky.

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Editorials

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In this shimmering collection, [Mason] brings to life a winning cast of men and women who forge on, even though their quest for home has compromised their dreams.

Denver Post

Stuns with its effortless craft and lingering grace . . . Mason's stories are masterful in their quiet simplicity.

Elmore Leonard

I love the way Bobbie Ann Mason writes, the way she brings her people to life in so few words. I've been a fan since Shiloh.

Miami Herald

Mason's great skill is in creating fully realized lives in the space of a few pages.

New York Times

Leaves the reader with an affecting portfolio of portraits of small-town lives caught in medias res.

Wall Street Journal

Sitting down with one of these stories may well be the next best thing to going home again.

Kirkus Reviews

Appropriately homely imagery and dead-solid perfect dialogue help some, but don't do nearly enough to animate the morose folks who wander through the 11 uneven stories in this third collection from the Kentucky author (Midnight Magic (1998); Clear Springs (1999). Most of those characters are women returning to their old abandoned Kentucky homes in the wake of compulsive meandering, busted marriages, or affairs that have gone nowhere. For example, the earthy protagonist of "With Jazz," twice-divorced, mourning the daughter who died in childhood, ceaselessly bar-hopping. Or Wendy, of "Night Flight," seen "returning to the place she had once been so eager to escape," hoping good-ol'-boy Bob may after all love her as much as he loves a good time; or divorced Sandra McCain (of "The Funeral Side"), back from Alaska to stay with her widowed father, a mortician whose dutiful relationship with death is in fact the source of his resilience and strength. Too many of these pieces recycle essentially similar premises and details, remain undeveloped, and trail off into inconclusive endings. Mason's prose has a certain colloquial snap and lilt, and she's capable of both quietly arresting metaphors ("Snow made hats on garbage cans") and deadpan hilarious renderings of colloquial speech ("He had one eyebrow that went all the way across. Them's the guys to watch out for") that occasionally recall Flannery O'Connor at her devastating best. But on balance this is a disappointing volume, redeemed only by moments in "A Funeral Side," and two unqualified successes. "Tobrah" recounts 40ish, (again!) twice-divorced Jackie's slow, troubled bonding with her five-year-old half-sister, the child of her father's oldage, bequeathed to her perhaps as a mocking revelation of the comforts of motherhood to which Jackie has come too late. And "Charger," about a 19-year-old working in a fertilizer plant and fighting off both depression and the temptation to settle down with his agreeably trashy girlfriend, is a laconic, bittersweet beauty. But Mason hasn't been often at her best since early in her career. Sadly, Zigzagging does little to reverse the downward trend. Author tour