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Like a seam of coal, that mineral she knows so well, Kiki DeLancey is a valuable find, and a rare one as well: the self-taught writer who seems to have sprung fully formed out of nowhere. In the pages of Coal Miners Holiday (mining jargon for a forced layoff), DeLancey introduces us to the culture and characters of coal-mining towns bordering the Ohio River. Though she has a B.A. in political science and English, DeLancey never took a writing course, never had a writing mentor. She learned to write by reading such masters as William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, then writing, and rewriting her own stories. And DeLancey is, first and foremost, a storyteller. Things happen in DeLanceys world: a woman washes the bodies of her four small children, one by one, as they die from a mysterious fever sweeping through coal country. An immigrant woman, living alone on the banks of the Ohio, undertakes a doomed quest to bake the bread her children loved, forty years ago. After quitting smoking, a smalltown sheriff is so infuriated by his friends lighting up in a no-smoking area, he shoots him in the knees. While the characters may remind us of Raymond Carversin their marginal status as well as in their complex human dignitythe prose is often lush and lyrical, more Faulknerian than minimalist. Kiki DeLancey tells the stories of unseen American immigrantsPolish, Greek, Irish, and otherswho worked under the earth, in the dark and dangerous heart of the heart of the country. The result is a revelatory new voice in American fiction. |
