REDDING UP

Snodgrass presents a collection of linked short stories that revolve around a failed steel town in Western Pennsylvania.

As the author observes in a prefatory note, the once-booming steel mills in the Keystone State began to go bust in the 1980s, and with that lost prosperity, an entire way of life vanished. Here, he offers elegiac tales set in his struggling fictional town of Furnass, outside Pittsburgh; one of them, “Coda,” is a short story, while the others, including the titular work, are novella-length. In the first, Her Father’s Daughter, Jennifer Sutcliff seems set on severing her ties with Furnass forever; she reorganizes the real estate company that her father, Dick, built and controversially sells the land upon which he built it to an industrial park—a move that her mother feels is a dismissal of her father’s legacy. Jennifer then sets her sights on Pamela DiCello, the woman for whom Dick left his wife, and discovers a legal way to divest her of the trust Dick established for her. However, Jennifer finds herself moved by Pamela’s account of her relationship with Dick as well as her attachment to the place in which she lives: “I left a luxurious all-expenses-paid town house and way of life in upscale Seneca to live in this narrow frame insul-brick-covered hundred-year-old house in a dying mill town….This was my parents’ house, Jennifer; after they both passed I had trouble thinking about it just sitting here on its lonesome.”

Snodgrass affectingly portrays an increasingly obsolete notion—an unbreakable attachment to one’s home—in a world of peripatetic cosmopolitanism. However, the stories aren’t simply set pieces meant to present a philosophical theory; the author provides a powerful defense of locality by training his attention on a particular locale and not an abstruse polemic. Herein lies the principal strength of Snodgrass’ collection, in that he presents a series of protagonists trying to flee their homes but who are drawn back by powerful, if mysterious, forces. For instance, in the book’s title story, Allison Lyle returns to Furnass from Washington, D.C., in order to settle her recently deceased father’s “haphazard estate.” She hires local Kevin McCallum to clean out a chaotic, overstuffed basement; he’s depicted as essentially the opposite of Allison, as someone who’s so attached to Furnass that he labors to preserve its disappearing past. Allison finally learns that she never really knew her father; he had a secret life, one that was admirably honorable. But instead of pride, this discovery fills her with a “tremendous feeling of loss, a feeling that she had missed something important in her life.” It’s a revelation that Snodgrass movingly relates, and it’s one that readers will find especially poignant, as Allison lives something of a secret life of her own. Overall, this assemblage of stories is one that’s as timely as it is thoughtful—a meditative counterweight to stories by authors preoccupied with wanderlust.

A poignant and intelligent set of tales that effectively thematizes the importance of place.