BOOK COLUMN: For exemplary writing, go read this collection
Jann Malone/Times-Dispatch Columnist
Sunday, September 24, 2006

The members of the Lunch Box Book Club have run both warm and cool about previous choices for Go Read, Richmond's annual community reading program.

Like many other book groups around town, this one, which meets at the Main Richmond Public Library and includes me from time to time, faithfully followed the program since its start five years ago.

This month, the members read the 2006 choice, William Henry Lewis' short-story collection, "I Got Somebody in Staunton."

This time, they ran hot.

The consensus of a group that's rarely in complete agreement on a book? Wow!

Our conversation kicked off when one member started talking about the gems of lyrical writing she'd discovered on her second reading.

Second reading? Lewis says this in the author interview at the back of the paperback edition: "I've tried to write stories that expect a reader to do some work, to go back and reconsider."

Understood, but let's hear some more about those gems.

Well, from "Kudzu," there's this: "Breeze blew through where the kudzu was thick enough to round the sharp corners of the fence. The wind pushed the vines from their tangle and fanned them out into the yard. When the kudzu moved like that, it looked like something large and hungry was rolling around inside."

In "Crusade," Donald Biggers, retired but still working thanks to a too-small pension, " . . . leans into the angry sleep of men who have smiled through too many decades of service."

Though the group talked about the book's themes -- we thought, for instance, that Lewis writes about people who are often invisible to others -- we kept returning to the writing.

That was what yanked us into these stories and never let go.

Lewis, who goes by Hank, is a natural storyteller. His stories read as if he were sitting right there in the room with us and telling them himself.

That's exactly what will happen when he visits Richmond Oct. 19-20 for get-to-know-us events and again Feb. 8-9 for the school and public programs familiar from past Go Read programs.

Lewis teaches English at Colgate University in New York, but his Virginia connection is strong. In the'90s, he was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and taught at Mary Washington College.

His book also has a Virginia connection: The title story wraps itself around a road trip from Fredericksburg to Staunton, when a black college professor agrees to give a white woman a ride. All the while he hears the voice of his uncle playing in his head and warning him that's how blacks get lynched.

How real is the threat? That was a good question for the Lunch Box gang to discuss.

As Lewis suggests in the interview at book's end, though, we did not interpret his work as simply stories about African-American life. They're more than that, another good point for discussion.

But back to the writing: It's straightforward, clear and deceptively simple. It doesn't get in the way of the storytelling.

That's the hardest kind of writing to do, a point the group thought teachers could make when their classes discuss Lewis' book.

Forget all the similes, the complicated sentence structure and the big words. Just tell the story.

Jann Malone is The Times-Dispatch's book editor.