Clay's Quilt (2001)

This is a nice little novel about a coal miner and his gradual attainment of self-knowledge and love. Clay Sizemore’s mother was killed when he was four, and as an adult, Clay starts to piece together his mother’s story, as he falls in love with a fiddle player with a troubled past of her own.

The story itself is very slight, but the prose is graceful and the setting lovely. It’s a refreshingly unsentimental portrait of Appalachia, with an interesting mixture of ecstatic Pentecostalism, alcohol, violence and sex. I was prepared to be let down with a dramatic arc that is fairly flat, but the author closes the deal with a final paragraph that makes you go ahhh. ( )

Good contemporary novel set in Kentucky; very likeable characters. ( )

Orphaned at age 4, Clay Sizemore is raised in a small Appalachian mining town surrounded by family-some related and some not. Over the years he is still seeking the missing pieces of his memory of his mother. Life in modern day Kentucky, filled with laughter, sadness, anger, and love. This book paints a rich picture of time and place. ( )

Clay Sizemore is a young coal miner, orphaned at the age of four and brought up by his Aunt Easter, a devout woman whose Pentecostal faith is uneasily reconciled with what her neighbors and family call “The Sight”. He has lived his entire life in the close community of Free Creek, Kentucky; the favorite cousin in a town where most of the residents are kin: His cousin Dreama, a vivacious girl with plans for the future, his Great Uncle Paul- a renowned quilter with arthritis in his hands, and his best friend Cake, the son of his mother’s best friend, Marguerite. But constant bar fights and Saturday night carousing hint at an emptiness inside Clay, a hole left by the fragmented memory of his mother, and his ever absent father. Clay’s aunts and uncles can say little about his mother, except that she was wild, and beautiful, and too young to die so tragically.

It is the haunting music of a young fiddle player named Alma that inspires Clay to start mending the holes in his life. He pursues the memories of his mother in his family with the same gentle persistence that he pursues Alma- a woman with her own troubled past. His life reaches a crisis when the events of his parents in the past seem to repeat themselves between Clay and Alma. But like the great crazy quilt stretched out on the frame in his Uncle Paul’s house, Clay’s life comes together piece by mismatched piece- each memory distinct and separate, and yet making something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Like any first novel, Clay’s Quilt has a few rough spots- the dialogue falters in places, and the symbolism, of quilts and seasonal renewal, is sometimes overt. Nor should readers expect Clay’s Quilt to be a story of the harsh trials and lives of coal miners. The author’s Appalachia is a firmly modern one- the trailers have air conditioners, and coal mining, like trucking or bartending, is just a job (albeit harder than some and better paid than most). There is no question that Silas House has a powerful story here, it carries the reader over the occasional cliché. Any publisher would say it was “in the tradition of Lee Smith’s Oral History, or Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek” to convince the wary buyer to give this book a try. Algonquin Books simply says that Clay’s Quilt is about a young man’s journey, and an Appalachian peoples’ struggle to hold on to their heritage. That should be enough for anyone.

This book is by a Southern storyteller who brings his characters to life. Having gone to school and traveled in the Appalachians, I loved reading a story that captures the voices and the region so well. ( )