FURROW AND SLICE

A collection of short stories and a novella examine the trials of rural life in a fictional Pennsylvania town.

Snodgrass’ assemblage of fiction, which includes more than three dozen short stories, is set in and around Furnass, Pennsylvania, an old mill town straining under the pressure of modern capitalism and its relentless spread. The prolific construction of McMansions is like a death toll for the area’s vanishing farms, which seem terminally incapable of keeping pace with the times. One of the abiding themes is the disappearance not only of farms, but also legacies—fathers lament the unwillingness of their sons to take over lands they can no longer maintain. For example, in the collection’s novella, The Hill Wife, Noah, an octogenarian farmer, struggles to make ends meet. He wonders if his son, William, a successful real estate agent, pines for his father’s death so he can sell the land. The author presents a typically sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Noah’s tug of war between pride in his son’s accomplishments and resentment at his cold profiteering. In “The Easy Part,” a farmer named Clay is pressured to sell his property, but he clings to the land that has been in his family for eight generations. The short tales are typically very brief, some only a page or two, giving them an impressionistic character, quick snapshots of lives suggestive of backstories never fully revealed. A black-and-white photograph by the author accompanies each tale, highlighting the fiction’s ambient forlornness—a sad nostalgia for a culture that is disappearing not slowly but assuredly.

Snodgrass is at his best establishing an atmosphere of quiet desperation—many of his protagonists, like Clay, know that they can’t win but cling nevertheless to their rapidly displaced ways of life and the inheritances from their ancestors. This stubborn refusal to go quietly can take the form of a defiant, if feckless, pride or materialize as shame. In “An Annunciation,” BJ walks into a clinic in her “brown plaid Walmart five-dollar special jacket” only to be confronted by better-heeled patients. She worries that she’s quickly pegged as “white trash.” The author also unflinchingly tackles the suddenness and inevitability of death and the “endless guilts” of infidelity. Snodgrass artfully contrives an entire literary cosmos, a fossilizing fictional world that faces extinction. But that thick air of lament can be oppressively lugubrious—this is a leaden universe without wit or levity, and the ponderousness can be suffocating. Some of the stories seem to be straining to impart a lesson or function like a moral parable, resulting in a tincture of didacticism. In these tales, treacly sentimentality rears its head. In “Be Still My Heart,” Mary Beth is forced to witness the death of her loved ones repeatedly, a curse of longevity. Her sorrow, though, comes across as canned: “ ‘I had desires too,’ she said out loud, shouted down the hallway. ‘I wanted things too. I’m more than just another fancy plate hanging on the wall. More than just a figurine on a shelf. More than something to put in a stack with all the other stuff you’ve used up but keep around just so nobody else can have it.’ ” Nonetheless, this is a thoughtful compilation, poetically meticulous and often touching.

A vivid, moving collection that explores the unrecoverable past.