Hollow Ground
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A Tennessee writer's sure-footed debut
REVIEW BY LINDA STANKARD The setting for Hollow Ground, Stephen Marion's impressive debut novel, is a small Tennessee town which has been so aggressively mined for zinc that large pockets of earth, unsettled by the extensive labyrinth of underground tunnels, cave in unexpectedly, leaving in one instance, a chasm "bigger than a house." "You could look all the look off of it and not never believe it," a woman in the crowd says, staring in disbelief at the gaping hole. But unreliable ground is an intrinsic fact of life in Alexander City. The shifting earth leaves the characters who inhabit "Zinctown" searching for solid footing, something firm to hold onto, but their relationships are as unstable as the earth beneath their feet. Two central characters around whom the story swirls are Taft, a 14-year-old boy in the confused throes of first love/lust with his strangely beautiful, precocious next door neighbor, (she can't decide if she wants Taft to kill her mother or make a baby with her, a conversation which causes Taft to ruminate that "he didn't much want a baby, but he wanted something") and Gary, Taft's newly returned biological father. Gary is a Vietnam vet turned cop who left town before Taft was born, but who suddenly glides back into his life, resuming a relationship with his mother. The ostensible reason for Gary's return is his desire to find the gravesite of a younger brother, but it is while searching for the missing Moody Myers, Taft's "grandfather," who had "been around forever" and who was equally accepted in "all quarters all over Alexander County," that Gary feels most at peace. He finds a vocation in going up and down the river by boat in search of Moody, a man who characterizes his lifelong search for artifacts and pieces of Zinctown history as his "quest." Father and son seem to circle around each other as they observe one another from the circumference of their lives, but in a small town, even the widest circles tend to overlap. Marion creates an intriguing cast of female characters who bring father and son into closer proximity. Of course, there is Brenda, Taft's mother, who is a crucial link, but there is also Clarice, Taft's "knockout" aunt who lives on the edge of fear, cohabiting with Taft's tempestuous and increasingly dangerous uncle Tony, and Tonya, the neighbor who is anything but the typical "girl next door." The notes she leaves for Taft under a rock in his yard, full of youthful confusions and contradictions, joie de vivre, contempt for her parents, sexual curiosity and bravado and a longing for something outside herself, are one of the novel's richest features. The ground on which these characters tread may be shaky, but Marion has a rock solid gift for the written word, and Hollow Ground is sure to be his cornerstone. Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.
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