Hollow Ground by Stephen Marion (review)

Stephen Marion. Hollow Ground. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2002. 308 pages. $23.95 cloth. Stephen Marion's debut novel is rich—rich with history, with sight, sound, and smell, with the musical talk of East Tennessee, and with an energy so magnetic you can nearly feel the seismic shifts as you read. The earth, in fact, does shift in Hollow Ground. This coming-of-age story about fourteen-year-old Taft Defaro takes place in Alexander City, Tennessee, formerly known as Zinctown. The zinc mines, running in complex mazes below the town, have hollowed out the earth above, so that sinkholes and cave-ins are appearing with frightening regularity. The City Bank safe is sinking, the church steeple is askew, and the Little League baseball field his collapsed. As the story opens, Taft's step-grandfather, Moody Myers, brings Taft to witness the aftermath: "Gathered behind second base, most of the people had their arms poised on their hips in an attitude of disbelief, because a patch of earth bigger than a house had fallen in." One onlooker remarks dryly: We ain't never going to find third base. Them mines has dug all up in under this town like a pack of groundhogs, said another. Now you look. You, said a woman, could look all the look off of it and not never believe it. This tenuous ground is the patch of earth Stephen Marion has been treading his whole life. He grew up in Jefferson County, Tennessee, where the New Jersey Zinc and Asarco Companies have been mining zinc for over a hundred years. Writing in Algonquin's literary magazine, The Algonkian, Marion says: "Once the city manager in Jefferson City showed me a map overlay of the mine shafts beneath the town, and it was like lifting a rock to see all the ant tunnels. They went everywhere. There is not a street, nor a building or a field, that doesn't have mine shafts beneath it." Marion, who graduated from CarsonNewman College in his home county, left there to earn the M.F.A. from Cornell University, where earlier versions of Hollow Ground won him the Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize for Fiction. After graduation from Cornell, he returned to his home and resumed his position as staff reporter and photographer for the local newspaper. His life experiences as a resident and chronicler of Jefferson County serve him well in crafting the characters of Alexander City as they journey 102 through their own dark tunnels, literally and figuratively, searching for light, for meaning. Taft Defaro's father, Gary Solomon, abandoned Taft's mother, Brenda, when she was pregnant with Taft. After serving in Vietnam and several short stints as a sheriff's deputy in a half-dozen places, Gary returns to Alexander City. In addition to working his way through the awkwardness of reconnecting with Brenda and of reconciling himself as Taft's father, Gary hopes to locate the grave of his brother who died as a child and whose burial place has been kept secret by Gary's father. Gary turns to Moody Myers for help. Moody is the unofficial county historian, community archivist, and local museum curator. Moody knows everything, everyone, and every place in his county. He is also the engineer who mechanized the mines—"brought on," as one local man remarks resentfully—and built the mine's giant exhaust tower that figures ominously near the end of the story. Telling Gary that finding a lost grave is not difficult, Moody speaks the hopeful theme of this novel: You have to know how to look. . . . The WPA, they took readings of every cemetery in Alexander County. And cemetery trustees, they'll have their plats. Or the inside front cover of a Holy Bible is always a good place. You can even find a lost grave with a dousing rod, because the grave of each individual, no matter how ancient, is a small disturbance in the magnetic field of the world. Moody stopped and looked across the field. Nothing, he said, is never lost. Gary takes this advice to heart later in the story when Moody Myers disappears on the river. Gary embarks on...