Look Back All the Green Valley (review)

with his son, Louis. When his sister, Alex, falls apart completely in her early forties, Peter is there for her. Each of the eleven stories that make up The Green Suit is tightly written, without sounding a single false note. The transition from a single narrator in Part I to multiple narrators in Part ? is somewhat jarring . The reader, who has grown fond of Peter, with aU his flaws, may feel sUghtly disappointed to lose his particular take on things. However, Peter never recedes too far into the background, and soon we are happy to see what these other characters think of him. OveraU, The Green Suit, with its mercUess honesty and wülingness to forgive human faUibUity, represents the best of the comic spirit. (NS) Look Back All the Green Valley by Fred Chappell Picador, 1999, 288 pp., $24 Northerners may be forgiven for wondering whence aU the huUabaloo when Southerners rattle on about North Carolina's Fred ChappeU. Yes, he's versatile: a dozen or more collections of vigorous, artfuUy shaped poetry; a generous body of criticism that is continuaUy being updated by ChappeU's contributions to leading periodicals; and ten books of fiction, culminating in the recenüy concluded Kirkman Quartet. This novel cycle is, in most readers' opinions, ChappeU's best work yet. "Fred is our resident genius, our shining light, the one truly great writer we have among us," opines feUow fiction writer Lee Smith. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has caUed ChappeU "one of our indispensable contemporary writers," and the Washington Post declares him "an author to put on the sheU with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty." His numerous national and international honors make clear that the high esteem in which ChappeU is held isn't just a Southern thing. He has, appropriately, stayed close to his roots—most recently in the four volumes of autobiographical verse coUected as Midquest as weU as in the aforementioned four volumes of the Kirkman cycle. The novel cycle offers the tender-hearted, ruefully wise and frequently hUarious reminiscences of its likable narrator, a North Carolina boy from the quiet Uttle town of Tipton (near AsheviUe) in his state's western mountain country . We'd recognize Jess Kirkman (whose surname, borrowed from the Scots, UteraUy means "churchman") as an authorial surrogate even U the series' final volume didn't present him as a teacher, translator of Dante and poet who publishes under the pen name "Fred ChappeU." The tetralogy began with I Am One ofYou Forever (1985), an episodic coming-of-age tale set in the 1940s and featuring, besides young Jess, his ebuUient father, Joe Robert, and invincibly sensible mother, Cora; a parade of visiting "Uncles" (such as the austere Gurton, possessor of a magnificent white beard, and the phlegmatic Rankin, who travels everywhere toting along his homemade coffin); and other unlikely reaUty instructors. The book's bittersweet tone is beautifuUy embodied in the seriocomic figure of Johnson Gibbs, handyman and de facto family member, whose surprising sudden 196 · The Missouri Review exit from the Kirkmans' Uves injects a note of sadness. Brighten the Corner Where You Are (1989), the most entertaining book of the quartet, details a single eccentric day (in 1946) in the life of Joe Robert, an amalgam of farmer, schoolteacher, inventor and incorrigible prankster and fact-embroiderer. We observe him treeing a malevolent "devü possum ," explaining the godless precepts of "Darwinism" to his wary students, even doing a passable classroom imitation of Socrates ("a barrel of fun when you get to know him"). Jess's retrospective evaluation of this patriarch seems both cautious and just: "The truth was so sacred to my father that he generaUy refused to profane its sanctity with his worldly presence." Or, as Jess's sibling Mitzi later remarks of their father: "He was twelve years old till the day he died." Shadowsbegin to gather inFarewell, I'm Bound to Leave You (1996), in which Jess's beloved maternal grandmother , Annie SorreUs, Ues dying— but not before she bequeaths to Jess a marvelous inventory of stories: tales of her own upbringing and adult years and of other women Uving in and around Tipton. The novel's somewhat stagey...