Volume 31, Number 9 · May 31, 1984
Good Pix from Stix
By Robert Towers
Places in the World a Woman Could Walk
by Janet Kauffman
Knopf, 132 pp., $11.95
Leaving the Land
by Douglas Unger
Harper and Row, 277 pp., $13.95
Edisto
by Padgett Powell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 183 pp., $11.95
No one now needs to be told that great changes have occurred in the economic geography of the United States, that rural life has been transformed by technology, that the old Northeast and Middle West have lost wealth, power, and population while the Sunbelt and the Far West have acquired them—along with an assortment of new miseries. Recently these shifts have been subtly dramatized in the work of writers as disparate as Walker Percy, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver. The strong new fiction being written in the hinterlands suggests that novelists of urban experience and sensibility can no longer assume, as they have in recent decades, that theirs is the dominant voice in our literature.
Review, 2959 words
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