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San Francisco Chronicle -- Sunday, May 13, 2007 --
It's a different world out there in rural America -- with a
passel of struggles -- Reviewed by Stephen Lyons -- At first
glance, Ron Rash's double-wide world of snapping serpents, wounded
women, expired expectations and Pentecostal penance appears firmly
set in the "scraggly-assed pine trees" and red-dirt landscape of the
South. Yet the culture represented in "Chemistry and Other Stories"
resembles that of any number of rural American settings. Idaho
quickly comes to mind in "Last Rite," when a grieving mother, Sarah,
says while wryly observing her son's flirtatious young widow, "But
pretty didn't last long in these mountains." Sarah has earned that
line. Her son Elijah has been murdered for a few bucks in a rugged
area that defies political boundaries. She is obsessed with finding
Elijah's makeshift grave and hires a surveyor to take her there so
she can record in her family Bible the exact place in which her son
perished.
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Publishers Weekly – January 22, 2007 --
Chemistry and Other Stories, RON RASH. Picador, $13 (240p) ISBN
978-0-312-42508-1 -- An award-winning Southern novelist (The
World Made Straight), short story writer (Casualties) and
poet (Raising the Dead), Rash returns to short fiction with
13 snapshots of contemporary Appalachia. There are doublewide
trailers, aging cars and lost souls “resigned to bad times and
trouble,” but there’s also, in “Honesty,” a lit professor struggling
to get out from under his rich, cynical wife. In the title story, a
chemistry teacher prescribed Elavil and shock treatments for a
“chemical imbalance” seeks emotional ballast in the backwoods
evangelical religion of his youth. In “Blackberries in June” a young
couple—he a logger, she a waitress—buy a fixer-upper house, spend
their free time repairing it and plan to take night classes at the
local community college, but family demands and random events...
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