Volume 32, Number 17 · November 7, 1985
Southern Comfort
By Diane Johnson
In Country
by Bobbie Ann Mason
Harper and Row, 245 pp., $15.95
The Accidental Tourist
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 355 pp., $16.95
The first two passages are from Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist respectively, and the last is my description of a picture by Norman Rockwell, with the men's names taken from the caption. The similarity of the two excerpts from books to each other and to other recent writing, and, in subject and technique, to pictures by Rockwell (as this writer sees them), makes one notice the techniques that are common to these works of the new fiction with their fashionable settings in rural or small-town America among lower-middle-class people—what Jonathan Yardley has called 'hick chic.' These novels share a meticulous, literal description, the faintest hint of caricature, and a long narrative distance in which the author is very detached, a viewer rather than an interpreter.
Review, 2926 words
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