Brightening his corner.(Look Back All the Green Valley by Fred Chappell)

Look Back All the Green Valley, by Fred Chappell; Picador, 2000, about $25.

THIS IS THE final novel in a tetralogy that has taken about twenty years to complete. The first instalment, I Am One of You Forever, covered several years in the childhood of Jess Kirkman, with the story built around the visits to the family home of Jess's mother's various eccentric uncles; Brighten the Corner Where You Are recounted one day in the life of Jess's father, Joe Robert; Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You was the reminiscences of Jess's mother and grandmother, sitting together as his grandmother lay dying; and now, in Look Back All the Green Valley, as Jess's mother herself declines, Jess tries to tie up the loose ends left behind when his father died.

At over 1000 pages the tetralogy is a hefty achievement, but despite the importance to the story of mortality, in the deaths of all the previous generations of the Kirkman family, there is an airiness about it which is not entirely due to Chappell's being one of the funniest of contemporary writers. His humour does not wound; and the whole project is like a joyous hymn of praise to his parents' and grandparents' generations.

Where has he been, you might ask--modern writers, if they bother about their parents' generation at all, tend to use them either to discover more about themselves or to belittle them in order to make themselves look impressive. The answer is that he has been in North Carolina, more specifically western, Appalachian North Carolina, part of the South in which it is still a matter of pride that "old times there are not forgotten".

This is part of the USA that outsiders usually portray as impossibly backward, ignorant and violent. While his work is an implicit rejection of that calumnious cliche, Chappell does not shy away from the element of truth in it. ("We have our own supply of brutes, jerks, louts, thugs, and maniacs. They are only less organized ..." Jess observes.) In one part of her district, Jess's grandmother recalls, courtship consisted mostly of what the locals called "bigging", which was essentially rape followed by marriage if the rape led to pregnancy. Set against this is the story of the courtship of Jess's parents, too complicated and funny and charming to summarise here. And again, alongside those who thrive in their tight local communities there are those who simply do not fit, who become permanent outcasts within.

For his honest, devoted depictions of life in North Carolina in poetry (most in traditional forms, and all very good, as far as I have seen) and prose over thirty years, Chappell has been made the state's Poet Laureate. He shares some characteristics with another Poet Laureate, John Betjeman: their scepticism of fashionable notions of progress in all aspects of life, their love of ordinary people, their playful seriousness, their respect for the past, their love of places and their patriotism towards their own place, and their moving meditations on death.

In the first three novels, by Chappell's choice of surname (kirk, chapel) readers could assume that the story contained autobiographical elements. In this final book, Chappell leaves no doubt about it. Jess Kirkman, now grown up, is, like Chappell, a university teacher in Greensboro and has a wife called Susan; he also writes books with identical titles to some of Chappell's, under the pseudonym "Fred Chappell". This identification of the writer with the narrator does not quite work. Chappell is too self-effacing to make himself into a ...