Lester's Progress, and: The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank and Other Writings (review)

bread." But things have changed. Now they have a cat named Garfield, cable tv and a microwave oven, Elsie works at the library and Harper builds houses in a subdivision. Harper Watts is no Appalachian totem when he takes a spill while cleaning gutters: "Three months short of his 70th birthday Harper Watts reached to clean a clogged section of guttering, leaned too far to the left, and groaned as his paint-spattered old aluminum ladder started sliding. Harper looked down and saw two clotheslines and a rose arbor coming up fast, bailed out and jumped. He landed left foot first, did a hopand -skip to miss the yellow cat Garfield, and collided head-on with two rows of wet sheets. "Harper took out forty pounds of wet bed linen and a dozen clothespins, hit the ground in a flapping, sopping tangle, and finally skidded to a stop just short of the pumpkins piled against the garden fence." Still Harper is no less "Appalachian" for coming down in a domestic disaster worthy of Dagwood. This change through time, as reflected in the Watts family (change which is certainly typical of what has gone on in the region in this century) might have been further highlighted by a slightly different arrangement of two of the stories. The man and woman in "Take Two" are referred to only as "he" and "she," but this story could fit well into the second rather than the first part of Mountain Passage; it feels like a story involving young Vernon Watts and his cheerleader girlfriend in the story "Merry Christmas." "Take Two" might be about Vernon (the poor boy from out in the county) and Sarah Collier (the pretty cheerleader with the well-to-do father) after two decades. "Little Lost Sheep," while one of the more recently written stories, according to the author's foreword, might also have been more appropriately positioned, say between "A Matter of Vision" and "River City Run," for it is a story about Vernon Watts at age eleven, after he feigns blindness in the second grade, to keep from going to school, and before he is introduced to the masculine world of the tobacco market in Maysville. But these are quibbles about arrangement , not about the intrinsic merit of these stories, all well worth reading. —Jim Wayne Miller Caudill, Harry. Lester's Progress. Berea, Kentucky: Kentucke Imprints, 1986. Paperback , $6.95. Best, Bill. 77ie Great Appalachian Sperm Bank and Other Writings. Berea, Kentucky: Kentucke Imprints, 1986. Paperback, $6.95. When two outspoken authors tackle the ills of Appalachia in biting satire, the results can be hilarious and hard to ignore. Harry Caudill's Lester's Progress and Bill Best's The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank are new from Kentucke Imprints, two tonguein -cheek volumes whose very presence—as George Brosi says—are a tribute to small press publishing. Lester's Progress is Harry Caudill's saga of welfare fraud, corruption, politics, and much more, set in fictional Fletcher County in the Quackgrass State. Hero Lester Warrick manipulates the system to collect black lung benefits, payments to the blind, low cost housing, and enough other fraudulent claims to fill a cedar chest with cash and drive a deliberately scuffed and muddied but brandnew Cadillac. Lester also collects, along the way, a colorful credibility as a squire of the county. Caudill lays it on too thick, but his chapter on "The Unreasonable Becomes Public Policy" is alone worth the price of the book. Caudill uses examples such as the unarmed Marines in Lebanon, university degrees freely conferred on those who cannot read or write, and the million dollar army tank which has to have its engine removed for an oil change to convince a jury that "what is crazy, what is deviant, what is in fact unreasonable is now publicly, socially, and legally accepted as reasonable behavior." The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the verdict: "In America, the justices said, norms have been turned around and upside down." Of course, says Bill Best in The Great Appalachian Sperm Bank, some of Harry Caudill's theories—specifically those regarding the genetic defects of the Appalachian people—are themselves "turned around and upside...