cover image Spring Hill, Tennessee

Spring Hill, Tennessee

Tom T. Hall. Longstreet Press, $16.95 (221pp) ISBN 978-0-929264-73-8

Country-music songwriter Hall's tale chronicles the lives of brothers Phillip and Bill Zephries, raised in Spring Hill, Tenn., by their grandmother and her black servant after their mother runs off to Detroit to find work and their father commits suicide. After the first chapter, an abrupt leap of 27 years brings the story to 1985, when General Motors has announced a plan to build a new plant in Spring Hill; the balance of the novel details the consequences of the brothers' decision to sell the family land: their grandmother's dislocation, their mother's return and their own foolish use of sudden wealth. None of the characters learns from his mistakes; at the end of the novel the story begins again, with another cycle of births and attempts to preserve Southern tradition. With predictable plot twists, stereotypical characters, relationships and emotions hinted at but undeveloped, the novel comes across as skimpy, pointless and all but unrelated to the coming of GM to backwoods Tennessee. (May)