Clay's Quilt

Part coming-of-age story and part paean to Appalachia, this impressive first novel tells the story of Clay Sizemore, orphaned in a violent act that has left its scars throughout his extended family.

House, who is in fact an Appalachian native, has a keen ear for dialogue and a gift for creating characters who come to life on the page. He treads a fine line through the practices of the Pentecostal church, which influences virtually everyone in the book, whether they are practitioners or not. And the music of the region is practically a character in its own right.

If there's a flaw here, it's that there's not a lot of internal tension. The characters go along in their day-to-day lives and even the underlying love story unfolds without a lot show more of high drama. The few violent confrontations, driven by alcohol, drugs, and jealousy erupt, play out, and mostly disappear quickly, even though they drive much of the plot.

The quilt metaphor is handled nicely, but so subtly that if it wasn't played up in the title, it might have gone largely unnoticed.

I doubt this book is going to change anyone's life, but it's a nice read and would make a good book club selection. show less

Clay's Quilt is set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky in the late 20th century. Its people are bound tightly to land, church and family even when they have left the church and families have been fractured by drugs, death and dysfunction. For many of them, this bond is both precious and perilous, a tie that can be loosened, but never cut. At the age of four, Clay Sizemore survived the drunken rampage in which his father killed his mother and two other people. Although his memory of the event is fragmentary, it is embedded in his adult psyche, leaving him with a longing for his mother and an aversion to violence uncommon among his generation in that time and place. Clay voluntarily embraces the life of his community, going to work in show more the coal mines, spending his weekends drinking and dancing in the local honkytonk with his best friend Cake and walking the mountains he loves so deeply. He yearns for something more, but it is not a yearning that draws him away from his heritage. He wants to keep the celebratory life-affirming best of it without giving in to the destructive tendencies that are whittling away at so many of his contemporaries. Nature, love and music permeate this novel, and if there are any more honestly drawn characters anywhere in literature, I want to meet them. This is the author's first novel, although you will find it listed as No. 3 in his Appalachian trilogy, because chronologically this story comes last in the series. show less

While this isn't my style of story, there's no denying Silas House is a helluva writer. My sales territory includes Kentucky so I felt right at home with House's eastern Kentucky characters and locales.

The Clay in "Clay's Quilt" is Clay Sizemore, whose mother is killed when he was very young. He spends the rest of his time among his close-knit family in the holler looking for answers about her death and who she was, working in the coal mines, and enjoying himself at the local honey-tonk.

Ultimately the story is about the power of home.

Again, I'm more of a thriller reader but stories like this are a nice, occasional diversion.

Clay loses his mother at the age of 4 and is raised by a trio of aunts and uncles in Free Creek, KY. At 18 he moves to his own place and hires on at the local coal mine. His life revolves around work, weekend drinking and family until he meets fiddler Alma. He is immediately drawn to her but she is hesitant, in the process of getting a divorce from an abusive husband. Many of the supporting characters also have dramatic events happen during this book. Abuse, drinking, drugs and obsessive religious fanatics leads to violence and many wasted lives. The writing is poetic and language seems true to the area. Mining is a big part of their lives but not discussed at all except for the grime and it is obviously responsible for much of the show more drinking. show less

Although the characters are hard - drinking, drugs, poverty - they are also strangely appealing. And the tone of the novel is hopeful and almost joyful in its celebration of life. I liked Mr. House's exploration of how one comes to reconcile the tragedies and joys of life and how it is possible to go forward and not get stuck in pain. Also, I loved the writing in this novel - beautiful!

Clay’s Quilt concludes the Appalachian family saga begun in A Parchment of Leaves and continued in The Coal Tattoo. I was surprised the writing wasn’t as polished or as lyrical as in the first two books until I checked the author’s page and found it was his first published work. All the same, it still expresses the deep connection to the land that made the other two books so moving.

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. show more 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. show less