In Country (Mason)

In Country
Bobbie Ann Mason, 1985, 2005
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060835170

Summary
In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father was killed there before she was born. The soldier-boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent. "Astronauts have been to the moon," she blurted out to the picture. "You missed Watergate. I was in the second grade."

She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture. (From the publisher.)

The novel was adapted to film in 1989 and starred Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis.

Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1940
• Where—Mayfield, Kentucy, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Kentucky; M.A.,
   State University of New York, Binghamton;
   Ph.D., University of Connecticut
• Awards—Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award
• Currently—lives in Kentucky


Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky.

With four siblings Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky. As a child she loved to read, so her parents, Wilburn and Christina Mason, always made sure she had books. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.

After high school, Mason went on to major in English at the University of Kentucky. After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight. She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars.

She earned her master’s degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was published in paperback form as Nabokov's Garden two years later.

Stories
By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories. In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story.

It took me a long time to discover my material. It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was.

Mason went on to write Shiloh and Other Stories, a collection which appeared in 1982 and won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for outstanding first works of fiction. Later story collections include Love and Live (1989), Midnight Magic (1998), Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002), and Nancy Culpepper (2006). Over the years, her stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, New Yorker, and Paris Review.

Mason writes about the working-class people of Western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism."

Novels and memoir
Mason wrote her first novel, In Country, in 1985. It is often cited as one of the seminal literary works of the 1980s with a protagonist who attempts to come to terms with important generational issues, ranging from the Vietnam War to consumer culture. A film version was produced in 1989, starring Emily Lloyd as the protagonist and Bruce Willis as her uncle.

She followed In Country with another novel in 1988, Spence and Lila. She has since published others: Feather Crowns (1993), An Atomic Romance (2005), and The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011).

Mason also published her memoir Clear Springs in 1999.

Mason has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky.  (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/13/2014.)

Book Reviews
An impressive first novel.... The novel, at its most polemic, is an indictment of our Government's casual attitude toward those who survived an unpopular war but are having difficulty surviving civilian life. More comfortable with an amiable cat named Moon Pie than with his former sweetheart, Emmett expresses his distress in words that could be echoed across the country: ''There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged. It's like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can't get it back.''
Joel Conarroe - New York Times  (9/15/1985)


A brilliant and moving book...a moral tale that entwines public history with private anguish.
Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times


Mason's message is simple: the war dead are us—we are them—and, whatever political stance we took with regard to Vietnam, we are all Americans united by one past, one flag, one history.
Mary Mackey - San Francisco Chronicle


The size and importance of its subject and the richness of emotion that underpins it make the novel satisfying. It’s as impressive a work of fiction as I’ve read recently, on Vietnam or any other subject.
Robert Wilson - USA Today


Sam Hughes, whose father was killed in Vietnam, lives in rural Kentucky with her uncle Emmett, a veteran whom she suspects is suffering from exposure to Agent Orange. Sam is a typical teenager, trying to choose a college, anticipating a new job at the local Burger Boy, sharing intimacies with her friend Dawn, breaking up with her high school boyfriend, and dealing with her feelings for Tom, one of Emmett's buddies. Sam feels that her life is bound to the war in Vietnam and becomes obsessed with the idea because of the reluctance of her family and Tom to talk about it. Her father's diary finally provides the insight she seeksinsight she cannot accept until she has visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. In Country is both a powerful and touching novel of America that analyzes the impact of the 1960s on the culture of the 1980s and a beautiful portrayal of an often forgotten area of the country. Essential for adult and YA collections. —Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib
Library Journal 

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for In Country:

1. Talk about Samantha Hughes. How would you describe her? As a 17-year-old, is her voice strong or engaging enough to carry the weight of this novel? Has Bobbie Ann Mason created a convincing teenager? Do you find her interests banal...if so, why do you think Mason might have chosen such a character to tell the story?

2. Why has Sam's family ignored—or neglected to talk to her about—her father, Dwayne? How and what should they have have told Sam about him? What has been the effect of this erasure of memory on Sam?

3. In what way does the family's neglect of Dwayne parallel America's neglect—even amnesia—of the Vietnam war itself? Why has that particular war, and its veterans, been so difficult to acknowledge?

4. Describe Sam's uncle Emmet and the toll the Vietnamese war has taken on him, as well as his three friends. Why won't they talk about the war?

5. Do you know any men or women who served in Vietnam? If so, are there similarities between them and Emmett, Tom, Earl and Pete?

6. What does Emmett mean when he says, "There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged. It's like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can't get it back"? Can that statement be true of other veterans returning from other wars—or does the Vietnam war hold a special distinction when it comes to damaged souls?

7. What is the symbolic significance of Sam's distance running—especially with regards to her uncle Emmett? How about the faulty transmission in the second-hand car she bought?

8. Mason depicts an American culture that revolves around cable TV and shopping malls. What effect has that consumer culture had on the country?

9. Are Sam's many popular cultural references—to horror movies, brand names, rock stars—meaningful to you? Why would Mason have included so many of them—what role do they play in the story?

10. How would you describe the world and people of western Kentucky, the setting of the novel?

11. Parts of this novel are very funny. Where do you see the humor? In Sam's grandmother?

12. In Country is a classic coming-of-age story. Can you trace the novel's specific coming-of-age phases: separation, isolation, and finally transformation and reintegration? What does Sam learn at the end of the novel—in what way is she transformed or enlightened?

13. The quest for the father has been a literary theme from the earliest ages of storytelling down to the present. Symbolically, what does the quest signify? Why is it such a powerful theme?

14. How does the journey to Washington mirror the journey taking place in Sam's mind? How is that journey more than "just a camping excursion," in the words of one reader? What does the inscription of her own name on the wall signify? What does it mean to Sam?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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