Mason's 'Midnight Magic' Mesmerizing

It's hard to believe that Bobbie Ann Mason reached her 50th birthday on May 1. She still seems like a new writer, although her first book came out in 1982. Because Kentucky native Mason writes exclusively about her home state, many critics have labeled her with the somehow denigrating term of "regional writer."

Did anyone consider John Cheever a regional writer? No, yet the distinguished Mr. Cheever concentrated on novels and stories set in and around his home ground of Massachusetts. But Mason, whose short stories are often creations of rare perfection, has never quite joined the ranks of the big hitters along the literary trail.

Avid readers haven't heard from Mason since her 1993 novel, Feather Crowns. Earlier works included Love Life: Stories in 1989 and the novel Spence + Lila, about a long-married couple, in 1988. Her 1985 novel, In Country, was turned into an indifferent film with Bruce Willis playing the role of an anguished veteran of the Vietnam War. The book was much, much better.

While waiting new material from Mason, readers not familiar with her entire output might do well to take a serious look at Midnight Magic, (Ecco Press, $25), a new collection of short stories, selected and introduced by the author.

In her revealing (although much too brief) introduction, Mason discusses the writing process. "The mystery of writing is much like driving into the darkness in the middle of the night," she writes. "It's both dangerous and fraught with possibility."

She says of the stories in this book, all written in the eighties, that "it is a mystery to me where they came from. It's hard to pin down their exact sources." She goes on the mention a clear memory about the title story.

"Early on a Sunday morning in the parking lot of a supermarket, I saw a guy get into a snazzy blue Thunderbird that had 'Midnight Magic' painted on the rear," she says. That set her off, as she created a background for the driver, at first deciding he must have suffered a disappointment. She thought the character she had imagined might have killed someone, or perhaps lost his girlfriend. "But, as the story proceeded, he got nicer as I understood him better."

For Mason, the creative act is "a challenge to inhibition, a delving into the hidden and forgotten."

The 17 stories contained in Midnight Magic are uniformly excellent. Mason possesses the ability in just the barest few words to create characters that seem so realistic we almost believe she's writing about neighbors from our own pasts. It's a gift of magic, in that she writes with feeling and a thorough understanding of the trials and travails of average, everyday folks, just like us.

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