A Place That's Known: Mississippi

Pearson, the author of Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America , here continues his journey of self-discovery by mentally revisiting the locales that have influenced him: the Bronx, New York, where he felt repressed by his parochial schools; Long Lake, Maine, the scene of idyllic family vacations; and La Grange, Ga., his unhappy home for six years as a teacher in a small college. Pearson is interesting and sometimes eloquent in musing about such topics as the South's contradictory mix of gentility and misery and the works of literature that affected him as a young man; his identification with Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke awakened a desire to ``escape through stories.'' Interviews with John McPhee in the New Jersey Pine Barrens and Tony Hillerman in the Southwest, as well as a trip that Pearson took with his wife to England and Ireland, further contribute to this interior monologue about place and meaning. The author imaginatively weaves external and internal voyages as he strives to comprehend his father and his own three sons. (Mar.)