Orson Caskill—patriarch, storekeeper, philosopher, and lover of life (particularly as it is lived in Osier County, Kentucky)—is dying. Gathered to celebrate a family wedding, five people whose lives he has touched as a husband, father, lover, and friend join Orson, reflecting not only on him but also on their own lives. In a postlude, Orson’s granddaughter works at fashioning a life enriched by her legacy.
Although these “Sunday people” range from Orson to an outlaw and rebel to a professor at a prestigious university in Chicago, they all share a lifelong allegiance to eastern Kentucky’s coal-mining towns, rural villages, and beautiful, endangered countryside.
This intense novel’s seven characters seek meaning as it can be discovered through landscape and history, with each exploring their reality in a chapter of his or her own.
From inhabitant of a cardboard cradle deep in the Kentucky hills to young romantic in New York City, Geneva Clay is transformed by her journey and yet indelibly the same.
As Geneva’s family migrates from one place to another, the once-familiar landscapes of her Kentucky childhood blend into a mosaic of poetic memories and near mythologies. In an Ohio college, she forms enduring friendships that provide both sustenance and education: Ella, an independent and empathetic spirit navigating a racially challenged environment; Sammy, a sophisticated rebel who briefly mentors Geneva; and Annie, who introduces Geneva to the excitement and complexities of New York.
Geneva tentatively adopts the grand city, seeking work and love. After months of unhappy struggle and loneliness, she secures a position in a prestigious research foundation and, taking a chance on a brief encounter in a museum, gets involved with and marries Cullen, her first true love. However, continuing to grapple with reshaping her identity, she eventually leaves the Chatham Foundation and Cullen, too, behind.
Much like Geneva, we all must part with our childhood innocence and embark on a quest to find our place within the universe, one that will fill the void left by the magic circle of meaning we’ve left behind.
Many of us lose not only our childhoods, as we all must, but also the landscapes that make our early years a kind of paradise—especially true in this book for the former inhabitants of rural eastern Kentucky.
From the first story, about Clara Fenton’s enchantment with the young man who would go past her childhood gate with his guitar and her later encounters with him, to the final tale, about Kate and Emory Corliss’s return to Osier County to piece together the history of their family and visit their remaining close kin, these narratives will remind readers belonging to other landscapes what it means to rediscover their own special place. The stories will also speak to the reader about what it means to leave home to make a life and an identity elsewhere.
The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile is a kind of prose echo of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” celebrating the beauty of childhood while never losing sight of the wisdom that experience teaches us.
Jo Ann Kiser is a native of the eastern Kentucky hills whom chance has allowed a rich and varied life, from her childhood in the hills, to being a “checker” at The New Yorker, to completing a dissertation on Proust at the University of Chicago. She has also taught briefly at Morehead State University in Kentucky and at Tennessee Tech. The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile is her first full-length work to be published.
