The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Pink Houses and Family Taverns by Becky BradwayNicole Lamy
Becky Bradway. Pink Houses and Family Taverns. Foreword Michael Martone. Indiana Univ. Press, 2002. 233 pp. Paper: $17.95.
In Becky Bradway’s personal-essay pastiche, the author proves that you can go home again. “I tried to leave my family behind, like closing a book after creasing the page. You can always go back. But it’s hard to live in two worlds. I kept losing my place.” As the first person in her family to go to college and live for a time in New York City and Los Angeles, Bradway has marked herself as different from the rest of the farmers and miners and factory workers whom she introduces us to in her essays. “I had broken most of the laws of my childhood, doing what country girls were never supposed to do: get an education, live in town, hold a job, get a divorce, raise a child alone.” It is this vantage point that informs Bradway’s collection. All of these meditations about race, class, religion, hard living, and natural beauty in the American Midwest are charged with Bradway’s perspective as an outsider with inside information. The essays cover such topics as Jesse Jackson’s divisive visit to Decatur, religious fundamentalism, country music, and square dancing. Some are love letters and others read like dispatches from the front lines of American Midwestern culture. In this regard her essays are much in the tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about Southern sharecroppers. With Agee, Bradway shares lyricism and compassion for her subjects. Powerful black-and-white photographs—imbued with dignity and grace—by Raymond Bial and Katharine Wright underscore the kinship between Famous Men and Pink Houses. The photographs aren’t meant to illustrate the essays; instead, they add texture and atmosphere. Readers of Bradway’s wise and poetic essays will be grateful that she cast her anthropologist’s eye homeward and found her place again in the Heartland. [Nicole Lamy]