To me, the small-town Kentucky people of Bobbie Ann Mason's are stranger and more remote than the inhabitants of any French, Italian or Spanish village. I think it's because many of the men and women in "Shiloh and Other Stories" seem to improvise their styles of being, while the people in European towns are more likely to begin with, refer to, or depart from a recognizable tradition.

Miss Mason's people live in the spaces cleared or emptied by the movement of American life, rather than in the configurations created by time and change. They don't seem to progress from one thing to another, but to fall between one thing and another, to live in an absence bracketed by nostalgia and apprehension. To be restless or rootless in a small American town is to suffer a modern anxiety with none of the camouflaging sophistication of the big city.

A...