SOURCE: “Wonderful Geographies,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 406-16.

In the following excerpt, Johnson offers a favorable evaluation of By Land, By Sea, though arguing that some of the stories “lapse into melodrama.”

“The truth is,” Eudora Welty has written, “fiction depends for its life on place.” Her well-known essay, “Place in Fiction,” champions the significance of a story’s setting: “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.” The importance of location, according to Welty, transcends any critical commonplaces about “regional” writing or “verisimilitude.” Referring to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County but also to Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire moors and Flaubert’s French villages, Welty suggests that the mythologized landscape underlying any great novel or story is the primary source of its emotional power. Far from betraying a limited or parochial viewpoint...