Book Review – The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

The Posthumous, Sole Collection by West Virginia's Martyred Son

May 31, 2009

Released four years after his 1979 suicide, these twelve stories show an underdeveloped sense of craft, but the grime and beauty of West Virginia nonetheless.

In The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (Back Bay Books, ISBN: 0316715972, 1983), rural West Virginia pulsates with the two constant options characters are presented with: stay or go. Though the folks in these stories almost always stay, the reasons they stay are what become of interest to the reader: fear, unrest, responsibility. While the collection is underdeveloped, the reader can’t help but wonder what would have happened had Pancake lived to revise these stories and create new ones.

A West Virginia Skyline

Behind each of these stories is the backdrop of the southeastern American countryside, and perhaps nowhere in the book is the setting or story as successful as in “Trilobites.” The dry bed of the Teays River is main character Colly’s only salvation, as he keeps trying to find the hidden trilobites it must have. His father is dead, the farm is going, and his girl is somewhere in between, considered his girl only by him.

Colly talks of leaving at the end, but the reader has to doubt him, as he is the trilobite in the old river bed, never to be uncovered. Perhaps Pancake’s greatest achievement, it is unfortunately followed up with the uneven “Hollow.” The ending is beautifully haunting, but the path to it is too long and unnecessarily winding. Longer stories such as “Fox Hunters” and “The Scrapper” suffer from similar problems, despite strongly written endings and portions of their guts.

Pancake’s emotional attachment to the area where all of these stories are set is a semisweet affair. While it’s where he gets his detail for not only the clothes people wear, how they hold coffee cups, how they speak of the deceased, but how they feel as they do it, it makes his scope too narrow. The dialect is overpowering, and Pancake too often gets absorbed in the regional aspects of a scene, making it last longer than it should.

A Foreword and Two Afterwords Try to Explain the Mystery of Breece D’J Pancake

In the opening and both closing additions to the collection, all three men (James Alan McPherson, John Casey, and Andre Dubus III, respectively) comment on the mystery of Breece D’J Pancake. They all speak of his voice, his passion for the people and places he wrote of (it would be silly to doubt those, surely), but there are only passing references to his craft. His prose is not necessarily weak, but definitely immature, rough when it should be raw.

Contrary to his knack for endings, Pancake’s beginnings are gratuitously difficult to lock into. “In the Dry” and “First Day of Winter” explode at the end, but after starting on shaky ground, the crowd has dwindled considerably at what could have been a massive spectacle. The hybrid point-of-view and past-tense flashes make grasping “In the Dry” from its first words a difficult task, and – like many of the other stories – “First Day of Winter” assumes that the reader already knows information about the characters as the story starts.

The foreword and afterwords are well-written and insightful as to the life of Pancake, but they are allowing his life and subsequent death to overshadow what is, essentially, in-progress work by a young writer. These stories are strong in voice and confident in style, but they lack necessary polish.

A Limited, Yet Understandable Appeal

Despite the aforementioned flaws, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake is far from a waste of time. Anyone with a connection to the backwoods cusp of West Virginia should take notice of these stories for what comes off as an honest portrayal of the areas most harrowing and bleak characteristics. These stories should be read by all literary-fiction writers in the mid-level stages of their writing growth, as Pancake’s strengths show clearly the necessary skills to reach such a level and – in his weaknesses – the skills necessary to advance.

The copyright of the article Book Review – The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in American Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Book Review – The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.