Hollow ground : a novel /

Marion's debut novel sounds an authentic note. The "ground" around Zinctown, Tennessee, is metaphorically hollow, but literally as well: "The hole went deep, breathing up the cool smell of dirt and sassafras past the rents of jagged sod. A few junked cars had already been dumped in the bottom ... a few stray numbers, probably from last season's last game, still hung on the American Legion scoreboard." Characters find themselves at constant risk of falling into holes created both by family history and by the mines, which have "dug all up in under this town like a pack of groundhogs." Marion's voice remains steady, calm, and mostly dead on, even when he describes bizarre incidents (and there are plenty), some bristling with grotesque humor. Despite a tendency toward symbolic descents, deaths and rebirths, the novelist manages complex scenes well, and he has a fine sense of balance between the horrible and the humorous. His remarkably unsentimental depiction of adolescent "friendship" and adult incompetence rings true. Though the language and setting work better than the plot, which seems both repetitive in places and truncated at the end, this is a strong first novel. All collections of contemporary fiction. S. F. Klepetar St. Cloud State University

The endless search for what is lost is the haunting theme of this impressionistic novel featuring 13-year-old Taft, who must deal with the fact that Gary, the father he never knew, has suddenly returned to his hometown of Zinctown, Tennessee. As Taft struggles to find his own way to process issues that feel too big--Why did his father leave? What does Gary want from him? Will his mother be hurt again?the adults around him don't seem to have any solid answers. His grandfather obviously regrets the fact that he figured out how to mechanize the mine that gives the town its name, and he spends all his time piecing together the town's history. His wild uncle Tony has gone on a bender and hurt his girlfriend. Tony is taken to jail but breaks out and makes straight for Taft. Even the town itself, overmined, has suddenly started sprouting sinkholes. First-novelist Marion takes his story in unexpected directions, and he writes in dreamy, evocative prose. A solid debut. --Joanne Wilkinson

A father's return to the Tennessee mining town where he grew up sets off a calamitous chain of events in Marion's eloquent but somewhat disjointed debut. Gary Solomon is the troubled protagonist who comes back to Alexander City (aka Zinctown), where he left behind the pregnant mother of his child as well as a series of problematic relationships with virtually everyone in his fragmented family. Solomon quickly discovers that things haven't improved much in the decade or so since he left his father is dying of cancer, and his son, Taft, is trying to make sense of his first serious crush on a bizarre girl named Tanya, who tries to talk him into killing her alcoholic mother. After Solomon's attempts to reconcile with the boy's mother prove problematic, he tries to restore order to his life by taking his old job with the sheriff's department. But the sadness and tragedy he sees on the job are multiplied exponentially when his brother, a violent criminal, escapes from prison and goes on a rampage. Marion is a poignant writer with a deep sense of compassion for his characters, and he captures the atmosphere of the Southern mining town and its underlying capacity for tragedy. The pacing is a bit uneven, as Marion tends to introduce dramatic events early in the story and does not connect the dots between the characters very clearly, but the combination of high-quality writing and well-drawn characters carries the day, making this a solid first novel. (Apr. 19) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A mature, eloquent first novel that probes the limits and powers of love as a man reluctantly returns to his hometown to find his father nearly dead, his son nearly grown, and the woman he loved not ready to forgive or forget. Gary Solomon comes back to Zinctown, Tennessee, a town defined by the mine that ran beneath it, with no clear sense of purpose. A failed marriage, a number of sheriff's jobs, and different places to hang his hat haven't erased memories of his father, Bid, larger than life and clear in his preference for Gary's brother, who died before Gary was born. Nor has absence erased the feeling he had for Brenda, whom he abandoned when she was pregnant with their child. That child, Taft, is now 14 and about to embark on his own romantic adventure-and, never having heard anything about him from his mother, is unsure how to handle the father who shows up in his living room. Gary is even less sure what to do, especially after Bid dies of the cancer he's been hiding from everyone, and after a local legend, Moody Myers, whom Gary relies on to help him find his way back into the community, goes missing. As Gary withdraws into himself, conducting a private search along the river for Moody, Taft goes searching too, for answers that only experience can give him. He gets into a dangerous situation with Brenda's daredevil ex-con brother, then finds himself in another as a mine cave-in turns the drive-in into what happens to be a smoking pit and buries him. As Taft comes of age in his way, his parents try to find their own way through the years of regret and disillusion to a life that can sustain them all. An extraordinary, engrossing debut.