Dark & Raw

Scott McClanahan grew up in one of those provinces in the American empire where natural resources are removed to the detriment of the land and for the enrichment of somebody else. His West Virginia is the sort of place where old matriarchs apply Vicks VapoRub and ghost stories as medicine, and wild dumbasses—friends, neighbors, relatives—provide comic relief and horror. A chapter in the memoir Crapalachia is called “Crazy Fuckers I Knew,” and McClanahan’s Uncle Nathan, incapacitated by cerebral palsy, asks young Scott to pour a six-pack down his feeding tube directly into his stomach.

Crapalachia has many suggestions of region: A hog that bites off a sick cat’s head, a quilt-peddling granny, a mountain graveyard, moonshine shacks, a denied mine pension. But with the exception of an ironic mention of a couple of “accidents of history” (the Sago mine disaster and Buffalo Creek Flood) that kept West Virginia down, this “Biography of a Place” mostly ignores politics, labor, economics, race, ethnicity, and the environment.

What it does contain is plenty of tales about people McClanahan says he’s known. These tales are McClanahan’s lights, in two meanings: His big talent lies in finding them, and their quickness on the page moves things along. They could easily be short stories in his earlier collections—a ceremonial dove, meant to represent the soul, won’t fly when released at the funeral, obstinate as dead Grandma Ruby was in life. A guy becomes obsessed with a girl because, “She wasn’t ignoring him like everyone else and that’s all it took;” Uncle Leslie “kick(s) the fuck out of The Toughest Man in Fayette County,” when Leslie is eleven—but here McClanahan strings them together, mostly successfully. One chapter ends with suffering Uncle Nathan looking sad, and McClanahan empathetically imagines, “It was like he was thinking about graveyards again.” The next chapter, titled “Graveyards,” is about a visit to a graveyard with McClanahan, Grandma Ruby, her son Nathan, and yet another uncle. (Ruby had thirteen children. More on that later.)

These tales, with their simple syntax and diction, have attracted a growing audience and allowed McClanahan to avoid the trap of regionalism. The prose may be more the product of Internet and pop culture anyway, with its slightly flat, alienated, but good-natured tone that’s more Kurt Vonnegut than Harry Caudill. Characters are preoccupied with the “outside world”—soap operas, movies, pro wrestling, porn—that’s already their own dirty-realist world.

Crapalachia, like the story collections, is also laced with comic-book or graphic novel sensibilities, such as typographical onomatopoeia (“Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick...”) biff-bam-pow interruptions of story (“BUT STOP!”), and exclamations by the narrator (“SHIT!”) that serve as meta-commentary on the progress of the narrative itself.

McClanahan’s smart, scatological jumble may have kept him (so far) out of the hands of corporate publishers, whose editorial and marketing resources he deserves. One is as likely to find in Crapalachia teen lore of a turd left in the principal’s desk drawer by a friend, snickers over crotchless panties, or a joke about the obese, as to find an epigraph by Robert Penn Warren, a possible nod to Joyce, or a phrase such as, “vague family parameters.” In some ways, McClanahan is a manifestation of David Foster Wallace’s prophecy that writers in the new millennium would try to have their po-mo irony and eat it too: “The quilt wasn’t a fucking symbol of anything. It was something [Grandma Ruby] made to keep her children warm. Remember that. Fuck symbols.”

The prose can be powerfully affecting. Nathan asks his nephew to shoot him, as assisted suicide: “I giggled but then I stopped. He wasn’t joking.” But it can also be sentimental enough to melt your Hershey bar: “There is enough fire burning inside my secret heart to keep [a list of people] warm for a long...