Category Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

The Monday Book: THE GRACE THAT KEEPS THIS WORLD by Tom Bailey

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It’s set in the mountains, it’s about a rural family living close to poverty, and it involves dysfunctional quiet love. What’s not to like about this novel (which came out in 2005)?

And yet, when I opened it and saw that the author used the first person narratives of several different people to tell the story, my first thought was Oh no. Most people can’t keep characterization well enough to pull that off successfully. The people don’t sound different, don’t want different things, don’t act as though they are, as Stephen King more or less put it, the stars of their own lives.

Bailey not only pulled off this technique, of all things, he did it by means of a weird kind of failure. His writing is pretty, ornate, descriptive to the point that I admit to sometimes skimming because I’m not that kind of reader. I don’t like long descriptions of wooded areas. (I accept this as a failing in me as a reader, and insert it here so you know whether to trust me as a reviewer.)

But I love, love, love when a writer gets inside the heads of others and makes the writing sound like them. And Bailey’s success at failing is that he did this not by changing the dialect or lexicon, but by changing what they want to talk about and how they want to talk about it intellectually. All Bailey’s characters – the father, the two sons, the mom, the girlfriends and the neighbors–have similar vocabulary. Yet they have very different points of aim to their lives and conversation. I liked this approach.

The building sense of tragedy, the inevitable moment that’s foreshadowed in the mom’s opening volley, lying in bed listening to her three men take off for their hunt, keeps the whole book’s plot humming with a kind of relentless bass thrum; you aren’t so much watching a train wreck as a ballet dancer fall. It’s a graceful tragedy, bittersweet in its one-step-removed sense of what it means for the family left behind.

In this novel, tragedy is masked in beauty and quietness. Even the hardcore parts about logging and shooting and men hitting each other are written in that once-removed elegance that must have frustrated the tar out of some readers. I like bittersweet, so I loved Grace. I’m now looking for Bailey’s other novel (Cotton Song, I think) to hit the bookshop at some point.

Ye Fairly Get Ma Goat Jack!

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Murder 2015 006Jack’s weekly guest blog tackles the Goat-Scape Scandal….. Alert readers will know that we have been finding new homes for orphaned kittens and abandoned cats for a couple of years or more, about 120 at the last count–kittens/cats, not years. Because we have a cafe upstairs we are very careful to make sure there is no contact between them, with elaborate security arrangements including secret passwords, handshakes and iris cameras. But, mainly, a very strongly sprung (and high) gate.

Despite this there have been Chinese whispers at certain lower echelons around our small town suggesting that we were really a ‘cat cafe’ – something viewed with approval in many developed Western Democracies, including parts of the US of A, but not Virginia. (Google the term if you want to read some fascinating strangeness.) Now you hear it straight from the goatkeeper’s mouth: No bodily fluids, far less cats or kittens, are exchanged between the bookstore and the cafe.

Having established that beyond doubt, I return to the fact that the bookstore rescues cats. So it’s not uncommon for me to see someone struggling up our front steps with a pulsating cardboard box and a hopeful expression. I refer to these people as “fur blackmailers” and tend to give them a swift and short answer. But it’s never been our friend Elizabeth before. Last Saturday morning, here she came. I opened the door for her and looked into the box – four baby goats!

“Didn’t Wendy tell you?” she said.

Back story – Wendy and Elizabeth jointly own goats that are accommodated at Elizabeth’s farm outside town and two of them (the goats, not Elizabeth and Wendy) had just had babies but weren’t letting them nurse. Elizabeth would be out of town over the weekend and Wendy had said that we would bottle feed them until she got back.

When Wendy posted a picture of the babies on FaceBook one of the small towners rubbed her/his hands with glee! On Monday morning our long-suffering Health Inspector arrived and said to me, in a world-weary voice, “Goats?” His boss had received the picture along with a diatribe about “why such things are allowed to go on”.

Poor Mr. Health Inspector’s expression mixed defeat with relief when I took him through to the back of the bookstore where the goats had been–nowhere near the cafe, which hadn’t been open when they were hereMurder 2015 003. He offered the observation that “this was a new one” and said someone in Northern Virginia was trying to start a cat cafe, so tensions about animals and eateries were at an all-time high in his world. We shook hands and he left. Laughing.

The publicity from Goat-Scape went six times ’round the Internet that day and the next, which I suspect was not what the Small Towner who sent the picture had in mind. Getting someone’s goat is now a catch phrase around here. And Elizabeth and Wendy’s goats have had four more babies between them – they are now grandmothers of eight.

Life goes on.