Out of Peel Tree Archives

Review by Thomas Michael Duncan

Nearly one hundred years have passed since Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio introduced American readers to the novel-in-stories, but the form has yet to be embraced by a wide audience. But neither has it been rejected or abandoned altogether. Publishers anxious about selling readers on loosely connected stories have gone to some lengths to disguise such books (also called composite novels, or short story cycles) as traditionally structured novels. Jenifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, is the most critically acclaimed novel-in-stories, yet the cover simply labels it “a novel,” and it is often referred to vaguely as a work of fiction.

Perhaps readers resist the novel-in-stories because these books rarely feature a single protagonist, instead focusing on a specific place or group of people. Like Winesburg, Ohio features stories about a fictional, small-town Ohio family, Out of Peel Tree, the debut novel-in-stories by Laura Long, follows a family from a fictional Appalachian town. Long’s stories explore critical junctions in the lives of four generations of West Virginian women. A wife learns of her husband’s previous marriage for the first time through an obituary. An old widow captures a would-be-thief by consulting her husband’s ghost. An engaged woman has second thoughts when her wedding is postponed for her fiancé’s chemotherapy. These stories are heavily ruminative, and ripe with detailed imagery. Plot is not so much a driving force as an occasional companion to portraits of working-class life. Continue reading →