Midnight Magic

Readers of Bobbie Ann Mason looking for something new won't find it in Midnight Magic; this collection of 17 stories culled from two previous collections, Shiloh and Other Stories and Love Life, is more likely to satisfy fans who can be content with a compendium of greatest hits. Since her debut in the early '80s, Mason has been part of a group of writers from the new South--authors who, though they share the same geography with old masters like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, bring an entirely different perspective to it. Gone are the pages-long parenthetical paragraphs of Faulkner; gone are O'Connor's acute renderings of Southern psychology. Mason's characters wouldn't recognize psychology if it rose up and bit them on the keister. This is a world of shopping malls, daytime TV, and unsteady employment, an ethos in which not-so-genteel poverty extends to the imagination as well as the bank account. Brand names and the titles of television shows serve as mile-markers in these stories, and Mason's (often) unemployed heroes and big-haired heroines are only vaguely aware of living lives of quiet desperation. Mason draws these portraits of real life with precision; her accretion of details work hard to bring the reader so deeply into the picture that you can see the crumbs of Wonderbread on the Formica countertops and smell the stale Old Milwaukee on the Sunday morning after Saturday night. Yet as precise and colorful as Mason's images are, in the end they are much like photographs--remarkable in the clarity of what they show, yet only hinting at what goes on in the hearts and minds inside the characters they portray.