by Lynn Stegner (Flyover Fiction/University of Nebraska, 286 pages) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum
Someone (actually, I don't doubt many people) at the University of Nebraska Press has a sense of humor--the otherwise scurrilous appellation, Fly Over [Fiction, edited by Ron Hansen], designating most of the United States between Philadelphia and Denver and no doubt coined in the center of ambition and greed, is appropriately mocking of that slur. As if to confirm the know-nothingness behind many things coined in Manhattan, this imprint's offering of Lynn Stegner's fifth novel affirms that (which ought be unnecessary) wonderful and creative human beings are doing great work out of sight of the great media gods of New York. Okay, I got that off my chest--
Lynn Stegner, whose bloodline (wife of Page Stegner, daughter-in-law of Wallace Stegner), in horseracing, would make her a prohibitive favorite, presents a story whose title is borrowed from Irish poet William Butler Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus." The main character, Kate Riley, was born on the austere plains of Saskatchewan (for you Americans, that's in western Canada) in 1931. Her beloved father dies of cancer when she is ten and Kate appears to spend the rest of her life attempting to recover the secure warmth of her father's love via countless unsatisfying liaisons, resulting in pregnancies and children (whom she abandons) and havoc in the lives she touches. Stegner's supple prose renders her protagonist with acuity and precision and gives us that pleasurable result that--may I say--readers are in search of, a good story well told.
Read an excerpt from Because a Fire Was in My Head. (pdf)
Purchase at Powell's.
posted by Matt Borondy on 4/30/2007 
