Bobbie Ann Mason grew "so sick of reading about the alienated hero of superior sensibility" who so frequently dominates twentieth-century American literature that she decided to write fiction about the antithesis. Her characters are ordinary, working-class denizens of rural western Kentucky, often living in Hopewell, her fictional version of her own hometown, Mayfield, or in some unnamed town equally distant from Paducah (which is at least sizable enough to warrant a shopping mall) and nearly a world away from the cities of Louisville and Lexington or Saint Louis, Missouri. Her plain-spoken characters are presented in a direct and unadorned style, which frequently earns her the label of minimalist, "dirty" realist, or--as she recalls John Barth's description--"blue-collar hyper-realist super-minimalist" or "something like that." Mason says her style "comes out of a way of hearing people talk." Typically her characters have arrived at transitional points or impediments in their...