cover image Willy Slater's Lane

Willy Slater's Lane

Mitch Wieland. Southern Methodist University Press, $12.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-87074-409-9

Wieland's lovely first novel is likely to entrance readers with the sheer quixotic wonder of his telling of quenched lives. The quiet understatement of the skilled storyteller is evident from the first paragraph, even the first sentence: ""Harlan and Erban Kern were eating breakfast in the kitchen when their living room floor collapsed."" Now in their late 50s, the Kern brothers live an eccentric, reclusive life in their house at the end of a rural lane in southeastern Ohio. They do not work. Neither has been seen in town for years, not since Harlan answered a personal ad in a local newspaper, thus acquiring Elizabeth, his wife. For three years, Elizabeth, who left a depressed mill town in Pennsylvania for what she hoped was a better life, has submitted to Harlan's raging temperament, feistily defying him. Suddenly, a grocery-store epiphany reveals to her that in her fight to survive as an individual, she is becoming just like him. Meanwhile, gentle, acquiescent Erban leads his own introspective life, reading an old set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and remembering the parents the brothers lost while still teenagers ""to a bad seal on a Mason jar."" Underlying Erban's submissive acceptance of Harlan's authority is an innate sense of decency, caring and unarticulated interest in and excitement about people and the natural world that surrounds him. But even quiet Erban will ultimately be surprised by the pulse of the powerful denouement that will alter the direction of these three lives. Very much alive on the periphery are the farmer folk still living near Willy Slater's Lane. Through the brevity born of perfectly chosen words, and through the pervasive intimations of hope, Wieland transforms this story of lives on the edge of ordinary into a psalm. (Jan.)