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FEATURED AUTHOR—LISA ALTHER Ambivalence Towards Home and Heritage for Lisa Alther's Appalachian Characters__________________________ Harriette C. Buchanan THREE OF LISA ALTHER'S FIVE NOVELS are firmly rooted in her Appalachian culture. In her first novel, KinflicL· (1975), as well as her fifth novel, Five Minutes in Heaven (1995), the main characters flee the Appalachian town in which they grew up. Alther's second novel, Original Sins (1981), has a more extensive use of the Appalachian setting, with only two of the five main characters leaving their homes for good. In all of these stories, the characters feel varying degrees of allegiance to their homes. As Alther tells their stories, the ambivalence they feel helps to underscore the changes brought by the late twentieth century to the southern Appalachian region of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky where factories and mines bring economic advantage at the expense of the landscape and traditional ways of life. More than answers, Alther gives us questions about real people, rather than fairy tale heroes and heroines. Hope emerges as the only positive value in a world in which there is no happily ever after. In Kinflicks, Ginny takes temporary refuge in the cabin where her grandfather, Mr. Zed, "had spent the rest of his life in virtual seclusion ..., trying to figure out how to undo what he had spent his lifetime doing—founding Hullsport and establishing the factory" (Kinflicks 69). She sees the cabin, surrounded by Mr. Zed's kudzu, as representative of the errors of the modern South. Heeding the claims of the agricultural extension agents who called kudzu "the wonder vine of the century" (Kinflicks 69), Mr. Zed planted it around the cabin. When it engulfed everything, Mr. Zed hacked it from the cabin by day and secretly planted it near the factory as his "secret weapon... . Before Hullsporters were even aware of their existence, the grasping tendrils would choke out all life in the Model City. The site would be returned to Nature" (Kinflicks 69). Mr. Zed's plan has not yet worked, but Ginny is conscious of her connections to his quixoticism. Jude's Cherokee heritage is one significant difference between Five Minutes in Heaven and Kinflicks. Jude has respect for "the Nunnehi, the 31 Cherokee Immortals, ... who came to help their descendants when they were in trouble" (Five Minutes in Heaven 25-6). Jude's father tells her of her great-great grandmother Abigail Westlake who escaped from the march west to Oklahoma by hiding in the same cave in which Jude plays. Jude thus grows up hearing over and over the stories of the displacement of natives by white settlers who wanted their land. When Jude leaves home to make her way in New York, she becomes better acquainted with her maternal grandparents. Her maternal grandmother clings to her French Huguenot roots, causing Jude to ponder how, while her grandmother's Huguenot as well as her father's Cherokee roots form only a small part of their ancestry, these roots assume crucial importance for both. "These distant Huguenots were the grit around which her grandmother's pearl of selfhood had coalesced. . . . Like Jude's Tidewater grandmother, both mourned some lost golden age. They all lived in a dream, a mythical time long since past" (Five Minutes in Heaven 150). Jude resolutely rejects this mythologizing in her own life, trying instead to cope with the losses that, to her, define her existence. At the end of Five Minutes in Heaven Jude returns to New York from Paris, unsure of the direction her future will take, but sure that she will live and continue to love, despite the inherent threats of loss in any intimate relationship. For Jude, her Appalachian heritage is inextricably bound to her father's celebration of his Cherokee roots, his mother's Tidewater pretensions that deny those roots, as well as her maternal grandmother's Huguenot pride that disdains Jude's Appalachian Cherokee heritage. Despite the confusion from these conflicting elements of her heritage, Jude hopes to achieve independent identity. Original Sins is a complex presentation of the modern South rising against traditional southern and Appalachian values in fictional Newland, Tennessee. Capitalism is in many ways the enemy...

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