By LAWRENCE WELLS, Special to The Commercial Appeal
"The One-Way Bridge" is author Cathie Pelletier's 10th novel and the fifth set in a fictional town she calls "Mattagash," loosely based on her hometown of Allagash, Maine, an isolated logging community a stone's throw from Canada with a one-way bridge that in her hands becomes a brilliant metaphor for love-it-or-leave-it rural America.
Pelletier may well be the northernmost writer in the lower 48 states. Her hometown of Allagash is less than four miles from the Canadian line. "Of the writers born and raised in Maine," says Pelletier, "including Stephen King and Carolyn Chute, no one but me is writing professionally north of Bangor. I'm alone in the wilderness. You'll often see a moose standing in the road."
Yet her writing is quintessentially Southern. After college, she moved to Nashville to become a songwriter. She wrote poetry, studied creative writing at Vanderbilt, and began writing "The Funeral Makers," which novelist Lee Smith has called "the first Northern Southern novel."
"We have the same Celtic storytellers in our genes," says Pelletier. "I found my writing voice in the South and wrote all my novels there. I know more about Southern writers than I do about New Englanders. I can feel and smell the South when I just think of it."
Pelletier will be reading and signing books at 6 p.m. June 6 at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, and at 5 p.m. June 7 at Square Books in Oxford, Miss., hometown of William Faulkner.
This will be another homecoming for Pelletier, who served as a judge of the Faux Faulkner Contest and was a friend of contest co-founder, the late Dean Faulkner Wells, the 20th century author's niece and ward.
Faulkner told the history of the South starting with the Chickasaws, white settlers, slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction and carpetbaggers, and the rise of the avaricious, unprincipled Flem Snopes. Pelletier writes about her ancestors, French Catholics on her father's side, English protestants on her mother's, Loyalists who immigrated from Boston to Canada in the 18th century and traveled up the St. John River to found the logging community of Allagash.
Faulkner lived and wrote in small, isolated Oxford, which had a university but no literary tradition to speak of. Pelletier was even more isolated. In the 1960s when she began writing as a child, the closest library was 30 miles away, a monthly book-mobile the only source of books. No one passed through town, for the road dead-ended after the last house.
Faulkner created comic characters like V.K. Ratliff, a sewing-machine salesman who brings news and gossip to isolated farmer's wives and general stores. In "The One-Way Bridge" (Sourcebooks Landmark, $24.99), Pelletier's salesman, Billy Thunder, sells Viagra that he buys online. The wives of Mattagash have been praying for their husbands to become impotent. Billy placates them by selling bogus Viagra.
Mattagash may remind readers of Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend. Both places are near rivers. Allagash is Abenaki for "where rivers meet." Yoknapatawpha is Chickasaw for "people of the gentle water."
Both authors mined the stories and characters they saw around them and their work caused an uproar in their hometowns. "Sanctuary" got Faulkner in trouble in 1931, when this sensationalistic novel about a college socialite, Temple Drake, kidnapped into white slavery, turned Oxford on its ear. Locals called him "Count no Count."
Even now, 51 years after Faulkner's death, Oxford residents share a heightened awareness of the real and fictional. There are theories about the "real" identity of Temple Drake. A popular parlor game is "guess who's a Snopes." Visitors search for the ditch where Joe Christmas, of "Light in August," crawled to escape a lynch mob. A plaque outside the courthouse reminds them that they are standing at the hub, the center, of Faulkner's "Yoknapatawpha County."
Pelletier has her Snopeses, too, though with a Maine temperament; and regional prejudices. One reader sent a letter to the local newspaper saying, "What has Allagash done to Cathie Pelletier that she would write this book?" Says Pelletier, "I hope she gets out her pen and writes another letter about 'The One-Way Bridge.'"
Just as Faulkner came home and never stayed away from Oxford for long, Pelletier has returned to Allagash, the source of her inspiration, and to the family homestead where she was born and where her father, Louis, who built the house, still lives. Not only is the past not dead. It won't leave her alone. Like Faulkner, she writes about what she knows, wresting from her own postage stamp of native soil a fictional community of eccentric, provincial, wildly funny, wickedly wise thieves, lovers, lumbermen and their women in a town called Mattagash.
Lawrence Wells, author and co-founder of The Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review, lives in Oxford, Miss.
Photo by Lisa Waddell Buser
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