Crapalachia A biography of place

GROTESQUERIE is a fact of life for certain classes, the wallpaper for folks who dwell beneath a certain rung of the ladder. Those without health insurance, say. Or money for gas. Or dentists. My people were West Virginia factory workers and, as such, immersed in enough gothic absurdity to drown Flannery O'Connor. They were bawdy and hard-hewn and never surprised when tragedy befell their lives. They didn't even call it tragedy, since tragedy was a thing that happened to rich folks with something to lose. Scott McClanahan comes from the same world. A West Virginia where existence is both tedious and shocking. Where violence is something to do. The death rattle something to waltz with. He writes about this grasping, confounding place in his insistent, balletic, more-poem-than-memoir memoir, "Crapalachia." McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. He writes in an elliptical fever dream so contagious that slowing down is not an option. It would be like putting a doorstop in front of a speeding train. This is not a book you savor. It is one you inhale. The memoir ostensibly tells the story of McClanahan's kin and a handful of beloved friends, attempting to preserve them in paper amber - a mission McClanahan acknowledges is futile even as he can't resist. "I tried to remember all of the people and phantoms I had ever known and loved," he writes. "I tried to bring them back, but I couldn't." One chapter presents a list of names. "Names that are written inside my heart, but my heart will die one day. So I want these names to stay inside this book forever." McClanahan understands that in West Virginia, nothing lasts, not even the mountaintops. He knows how families like his are buried alive, or worse, misshapen into caricatures for the amusement or edifying pity of others, a sort of Appalachian minstrelsy he accuses the authors Lee Smith and Silas House (among others) of practicing. This, he asserts, is not that sort of book. Such chippiness is to be expected. When you come from the hollers of West Virginia (or Detroit, or Texarkana), you develop a certain reflexive defensiveness about the hole you call home. "The people from here didn't have to run a river to prove that it existed. They didn't have to climb a mountain just to climb it," McClanahan observes. In other words, we aren't the eejits; y'all are. We below the rung see the world as it is - an embattled place where "the dying were selfish, and the living were too." For McClanahan's lot, fickle fate is all. Stop paying attention in certain necks of the woods and you find yourself buried by a rockslide. Or knocked out. Or knocked up. Obliviousness is a luxury of privilege. McClanahan describes how his grandmother Ruby would manifest a "look on her face like something terrible was going to happen to all of us one day. And you know what? It will . . . if not tonight, then the next night." Mercifully, like any charismatic Southern writer (and McClanahan is a Southern writer, even if he rejects the category), McClanahan mines his privation for comedy. It is funny when the family cat gets his head bitten off by a hog. It is funny when his grandmother tries to make him take snapshots of dead bodies. It is funny that God has abandoned whole swaths of humanity to the wolves, because to think otherwise is to tell a pretty (worthless) lie to yourself, and if McClanahan is about anything, he is about exposing the Truth. He doesn't just expose it; he shoves giant, messy handfuls of it into your face. "College never appears in Appalachian books," he writes. "We can't admit these sorts of things. We can't admit we've gone to malls. We can't admit we've gone to restaurants. We can't admit we dream our dreams. People won't believe you." He provides this commentary in an appendix at the memoir's end. At the same time, he debunks more mythology - including the self-mythology he has just spent 158 pages elegiacally developing. "I never actually lived with Ruby and Nathan," he admits. "I never poured beer down Nathan's feeding tube." "The character of Little Bill is made up of two people." And so on. He even edits out individuals from the list of people he has loved. For McClanahan, the truth may be unimpeachable, but the facts are up for constant review. Granted, reality is a construct, and memoirs aren't ever really accurate, and honesty is defined by the person processing it - but finding out that the characters and episodes you just laughed with or wept over didn't exist still makes you feel a bit like a chump (or Oprah). And maybe that's the meta-point. Don't get too attached to one version of anything. The dream is more real than the day. "This is a lie I was told as a child, but it's still true," McClanahan says in one passage, neatly summarizing his own relationship with legitimacy. His bigger preoccupation is a different sort of legitimacy. "I am making the world my mountain," he declares as his ultimate goal. Everywhere he goes he will carry dirt and stones from his home until, ideally, "the whole world would become this place. It would take a million years and it would take a million trips, but I would rearrange the world." Not for McClanahan small fantasies. He aims to lasso the moon, and he nearly succeeds. He is not a writer of half-measures. He veers from bravado to vulnerability to rage to pleas of acknowledgment within single sentences. "PLEASE keep reaching for me," he writes. "Please." If nothing else, his choices are deliberate. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger. When his grandmother died, McClanahan says, an aunt swore she heard her mother say, "Good morning!" right before she passed. McClanahan speculates that she was greeting the angel of death, or the spirit of her dead child was beckoning her home, or maybe "it was just the last little bit of oxygen escaping from the brain." He continues: "Maybe my Aunt Bernice made it up. Maybe it was just a groan of death that sounded like 'good morning.'" In the end, he concludes that even if it wasn't real, or right, or true in any sense, "there was still something about all of this that said everything to me." And the heavy history that precedes him? Did it really happen? "In my dreams it did. God bless the myths of this world. God bless those who keep trying to make myths." Including, presumably, deservedly, McClanahan himself. "Maybe that's the meta-point. Don't get too attached to one version of anything." Allison Glock is the author of the West Virginia memoir "Beauty Before Comfort." Her latest book, "Changers," will be published next winter.

In this innovative "biography," McClanahan, author of three previous story collections, blends the oral storytelling traditions of his native rural West Virginia with a contemporary memoir style, recounting formative experiences under the influence of his indomitable, melodramatic grandmother Ruby and spirited Uncle Nathan. The latter had cerebral palsy and was unable to speak, though McClanahan understood him perfectly, and after these powerful forces in his life pass away, he moves in with his classmate Little Bill, who was tormented by OCD and unrequited love. McClanahan's exuberant voice is conversational and confrontational, regularly breaking the fourth wall and joyfully blurring the sacrosanct division between non-fiction and fiction. The non-traditional narrative chronicles the peculiarities of Appalachian life--punctuated by mine collapses, quotidian tragedies, and recipes for chicken and gravy--and is infused with both boundless love and the ever-present specter of death. McClanahan oscillates between the resignation that surrounds him and a galvanizing hope that allows him to rise above the despairing, often violent place he calls home, just enough to get away, but not to forget. His singular mission is to create a lasting testament to the people he has loved and he succeeds: the book leaves an enduring impression. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.