Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories (review)

Fred Chappell's Ancestors and Others: New and Selected Stories (2009) brings together twenty-one of this magnificent storyteller's favorite stories gathered from the last three decades of his work with several new works into a single volume that many will find delightful, as only Fred Chappell can delight readers. The previously published stories demonstrate the breadth of Chappell's fictive vision and his fascination with history and fantasy. Stories like "Linnaeus Forgets" and "Moments of Light" that focus on the plant specialist Carl Linnaeus and master composer Franz Joseph Haydn are examples of these. Though well written and interesting enough, they seem not to represent Chappell at his best and, frankly, often seem much too contrived. Rather, the stories that show Chappell at his best are those that are set in the mountains of North Carolina, a geographical and artistic terrain that he knows much better and renders with more emotion and believability.

Of the new stories, the opening selection, "The Overspill," is one of the most poignant, as the narrator returns to "the small town of Tipton, where the Challenger Paper and Fiber Corporation smoked eternally." With this evocative opening, Chappell focuses in on a young boy's growing sense of closeness with his father while experiencing an unfathomable loss due to man's manipulation of nature and an overriding disregard for human life. This story, too, reconnects readers with the irrepressible Uncle Luden, the narrator's trouble-prone relative whose antics and travails never fail to amuse. Similarly, "The Overspill" connects readers to other stories by Chappell that share the same setting, the North Carolina mountains that he knows so well where one may view the "purple-black mountain tops" or feel the comfort of "the cool-looking mint green hills." Likewise, Chappell demonstrates his mastery of Appalachian storytelling in many of these stories like "Duet," and he offers a good dose of the strong humor, including much mirthful self-critique, that is part and parcel of the same art form, especially in "Broken Blossoms."

Although Ancestors and Others may not be Chappell's best offering, it is nevertheless a happy reminder of the extraordinary career of a gem of a writer/teacher in the person of Fred Chappell. That, at least, is cause for celebration.