Kentucky Voices by James Alan Riley (review)

the footpath, past the blackberry bushes, vines, and out ofsight, and knowing that he would die for me that day." The interviews remind us of some all-too-forgotten matters, such as how the mines were cool in a pre-air-conditioned summer and were warm when the cold filled poorly built houses above ground. They note also the continued complexity of trying to generalize about race relations in the segregated South. Price disclosed that every weekend some blacks would be visiting in his father's home, as friends. Acknowledging the presence of prejudice, he also noted that both races, "were in an identical situation as far as economics, need, itwas like an interdependence ofblack and white." In short, this is a book that is more than a source; it is a way in which shared memories give importance again to the lives ofpeople who deserve that and more. Rich in social history, and particularly strong on lives above ground, the bookoffers manyanswers to the continuing debate, and, sometimes , no answers. It stands, most ofall, stark and simply, as another memorial to the forty-four people who lost their lives in the Montgomery County mines and the thousand of others who toiled there and in the camps, making a life daily, trusting that tomorrow would come, and hoping for a better future. -James C. Klotter Kentucky Voices. Riley, James Alan. Pikeville, Kentucky: Pikeville College Press, 1997. 254 pages. Hardback. $19.95. Kentucky Voices is an intermittently fair-to-middling good read with no other particular distinction. Perhaps the compilers of this anthology believed that a Kentucky connection would supply "distinction," but, while it is true that every story exhibits some relationship to Kentucky, either in the story itselfor in the writer's birthplace or sometime residency, none is distinguished by it. Many of the stories are set in the region, although they provide little more than references to familiar geography. The reader may experience a very small pleasure at recognizing the name ofa street in Lexington or of a small town in western Kentucky, but "small" is the operative word here. Some ofour culture's greatest fiction is strongly based in a recognizable and distinctive region. Try to imagine Huck Finn starting his journey from anywhere but Hannibal, Missouri; picture Flannery O'Connor without Georgia or William Faulkner sans Mississippi. In fact, strangely enough, the more specifically and precisely regional elements are developed the more universality a literary work may attain. 71 Turning to the second word ofthe title, I must point out that "voice" in the sense ofrecognizable literary voice is also generally lacking in this collection. The stories don't really sound like they're from Kentucky as opposed to anywhere else. They're mostly from the place where standard 1990s American fiction is produced, wherever that is: nowhere, perhaps, or all over the place. Taken as a whole, Kentucky Voices is like a vacation where you never get out ofsight ofthe interstate. So specificity of place and specificity of voice are essentially missing. Most ofthe works are generic, neither particular nor universal, just typical, reasonably decent, unexceptional, inoffensive, forgettable. That being said, I must add that certain stories in the collection strike me as falling below the generic standard; a couple ofthe works (I will not name the authors) are plain silly, incomplete, assembled in apparent haste, unworthy ofinclusion in any anthology from any region. Were they—as I suspect—included only because ofsome tenuous Kentucky connection? Otherinclusions rise above mycriticisms. FrederickSmock'swell-turned, experimental piece "Anonymous: A Brief Memoir" is delicately and precisely evocative—and it is the only story in the collection that tries something new in narrative structure. Three other stories, all quite traditional, seem memorable to me: Jim Wayne Miller's "Logging Over," Lisa Roger's "The Retirement Party," and Chris Offutt's "Out oftheWoods." Coincidentally—orperhaps not— all three ofthese stories present images ofescape from Kentucky, either as a literal place or as a state ofmind. Miller's story gives us the striking image of a young man dead in a wrecked car in Laurel Fork; his body is under the water trapped in the car for months, and it becomes a...