SAP RISING By Christine Lincoln
Vintage/$11
One fault with books of linked short stories, such as Christine Lincoln's Sap Rising, is that readers are never certain which characters will reappear, or what developments are relevant to any climax the collection may have as a whole. The tendency is to take the stories more lightly than if the book were either a novel or a collection of unrelated tales. But in this debut, the stories are so sparingly told that nothing unimportant passes before you. The setting is Grandville, a rural town of poverty and country beauty from which a dozen odd characters are either coming of age, battling demons, trying to escape or attempting to return and find peace. Their plights are not huge burdens, just matters to be dealt with, but you sympathize with everyone you're supposed to: a girl who grieves her father's passing by trying to recall how he'd taught her to make acorn pipes; two girls who bond after one jealously persuades a group of common male friends to attack the other; a woman who brings her infant son to a tree believed by ancestors to be partly the embodiment of a slave girl who was given to running away.
The dialogue is rendered with a clear, authentic, understated dialect. The characters are caught in moments of growth and revelation. And the stories end in natural coda, while never flowery or heavy-handed. These are characteristics of refined Southern fiction, where so much is countrified, magic-realist or tinged with Gothic tones. Accurate comparisons are Zora Neale Hurston's Spunk, Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River and Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Ohio.
So who is this Christine Lincoln?
She grew up in the community of Lutherville, Md., where she heard her grandmother tell countless tales on the porch of their old farmhouse. And late in her young adult life she overcame substance abuse and rediscovered a long neglected passion for writing.
The New York Times and The Washington Post covered her graduation, at 34, from Washington College, a small liberal arts institution in Chestertown, Md. At commencement, she received the school's Sophie Kerr Prize, one of the best endowed literary prizes bestowed on an undergraduate, totaling $54,266.
The author now plans to pursue a Ph.D. in African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. And, of course, there's also a novel in the works. —Cooper Cruz
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2002.