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Sometimes you read a story and it stays with you, lingering until you re-read it to check if it’s as good as you remember, surprising you when it is. The stories of Breece D’J Pancake are like that―they so completely hold your attention, so deftly tap into feelings seldom brushed by fiction, that you find yourself returning again and again to try and parse out how he does it.
I first read Pancake on recommendation from a friend. The story was “Trilobites,” and it struck a nerve. It wasn’t simply the writing, though that was part of it, vivid and lean, and always grounded in the West Virginia of his childhood. Pancake’s characters are shaped by the landscape and inextricably tied to it; he’s known as a regional writer, like Twain or O’Connor, lending voice to Appalachia. But there’s something universal about his characters’ relationship with the land. The friend who first recommended Pancake said that his writing reminded her of her small, Michigan town. I understood what she meant; I thought of my own hometown in rural Vermont. It’s not the region, but the people who seem familiar―deeply rooted in towns and counties and frustrated by their own stagnancy, but unable to extricate themselves from the region, loving it even, because they were molded by the land.
Colly, the protagonist of “Trilobites,” feels this dichotomous pull. His father has died, leaving Colly to run the family farm. It’s a life he resents―like the fossils of the title, he’s trapped by his surroundings, while others, like his high school girlfriend, have moved on. But it’s also the only life he knows, and when his mother makes arrangements to sell the farm, Colly resists leaving.
Trilobites ends on a hopeful note, but it’s a hopefulness that Pancake couldn’t sustain in his own life. On April 8, 1979, when he was only twenty-six, he committed suicide. Four of his stories had been published by The Atlantic prior to his death, and two more later appeared. In 1983 a collection of his stories, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, was published posthumously and met with positive reviews. In her review for The New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates called Pancake, “A young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway’s,” and laments the fact that the collection is both his first and final book.
It’s a regret that remains relevant. Because even now, thirty years after his death, Pancake’s stories manage to shake you.
Read Trilobites
Tags: author, books, Breece D'J Pancake, fiction, literature, Trilobites
Filed Under: Feature Sights
Pancake decided to pull the plug on himself at a young age. He was talented, in a raw sense, and I discovered his work a few years back. Thanks for sharing this:
http://www.ronnierayjenkins.com
December 12, 2009 9:21 pm