Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990                   TAG: 9004290213
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN SCHROEDER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEW STORIES ARE MEMORABLE, BUT UNSATISFYING

The dozen stories in Mary Bush's first collection are good reads. Told in straightforward, unadorned prose, they bear the stylistic mark of Bush's mentor, the late Raymond Carver.

Bush's characters are drawn from rural, working-class life. Many of them tell their own stories; first-person narration abounds. And the stories these people tell are, for the most part, engaging. The problem is that few of them are memorable. Too often, Bush stops short of giving her readers a brilliant image, a jewel-like revelation, to be carried away from the story and savored.

But when she does take that extra step, Bush's writing is unforgettable. In the title story, a young girl is traveling to Galveston with her widowed mother, sister and her mother's abusive lover. When their car breaks down, the family stumbles upon a homestead peopled by a black mother and daughter of almost mystical powers, strong, empathetic, earth-rooted. Here Bush writes from the center of her being:

"It was an open place, full of light. The grass was short, growing right down close with the earth. Stones and small boulders cropped out from the wide, rolling field . . . After a minute, I noticed a cow, on the very edge of the open place, in a little patch of shade from the woods, not far from where I stood . . . It was a ghost cow, the color of bone."

There are other fine stories in the collection: "Muskrat," in which some adventurous children precipitate and then stand witness to an animal's self-destruction and "Underground Railroad," in which two runaways encounter an ancient blind woman whose generosity and trust counteract the horror of their home.

No one can accuse Mary Bush of being a romantic, of being afraid to write about ugly, unhappy things. Her stories rely on sickness, violence, death and disfigurement for their strength. What keeps her stories from having the strength of, say, Flannery O'Connor's thematically similar work, is Bush's failure to share a core vision with her readers, obliquely or directly. When the smoke settles, when the last story is finished, the reader is left wishing she had something left behind to hold.