Back Home Again: Bobbie Ann Mason's “Shiloh”

Abstract

For American writers simply to avow that they have the education, or the cultivation, that they very often have, is something that isn't done – they're like politicians who want to adopt a folksy accent. Susan Sontag, “The Quote Box,” Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine , 11 June 1989: 8. In 1980, Bobbie Ann Mason's first major short story, “Shiloh,” appeared in the New Yorker . The story was an immediate critical success. It was reprinted in Best American Short Stories in 1981, and became arguably the most heavily anthologized short story of the last decade; the collection that followed, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Mason's distinctive style traits – popular culture references, present tense, blue-collar and rural subject matter – have, with or without her direct influence, become dominant trends in the contemporary American short story. She is considered one of the chief representatives of a school of fiction variously named “dirty realism,” “K-Mart realism,” or “minimalism”: linguistically spare, thematically populist, and consciously antiliterary. This school developed such vogue during the 1980s that Mason's own work went from being perceived as a “refreshing” or “improbable” change from what usually appeared in commercial magazines and literary Journals, to being the exemplar of one of the two kinds of fiction found in those venues. “If,” in the words of Lila Havens, “Ann Beattie is giving us ‘bulletins from the fron’” – portrayals of middle-and upper-class angst – Mason is “telling us what it's like back home.”