Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories
by Greg Bottoms
Context Books, 235 pp., $21.95
There is far more heartbreak than sentimentalism in this important young writer’s important second effort (Angelhead), and there is, to his credit, an absolute lack of compromise. Bottoms’ is an erratic, barren prose-poetry aching with the consequence of each word used and left out. How else to write of death and disease, violent inner-city street theatre, Christianity and crumbling families? “I didn’t know how to pray then, not really, not in the way I would learn years later, when I was angry and unmoored and broken,” explains the narrator of “Nostalgia for Ghosts,” an otherwise unremarkable, derivative (think The Sixth Sense if scripted by Denis Johnson) story that nonetheless sets the tone — and introduces the nameless narrator/”writer” character — of this hit-or-miss collection. Bottoms is almost masochistic in his exploration of dread, but one senses he needs to explore. And while this is a trying read, a read that requires patience, his accounts of Breece Pancake — the prodigious Appalachian author who shot himself in 1979 and left behind only a volume of short stories — and James Hampton Jr. are nothing short of required reads.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.