Look Back All the Green Valley

Joe Robert Kirkman has been dead for 10 years, and his wife, Cora, is ailing when their son, poet and college professor Jess, returns to the mountains of western North Carolina in the final volume of the Kirkman saga, Chappell's chronicle of this curious Appalachian family. Strong-willed but incurably depressed, Cora has already begun preparations for her own death. Because of a mixup at the local cemetery, the family burial plot must be relocated, and Jess and his sister, Mitzi, are ordered to find a suitable new plot, for which they begin entreating neighbors who may have land to spare. Meanwhile, Jess must finally clean out his father's abandoned shed of a workshop. During the excavation, Jess discovers a map marked with the names of women, which he believes may be an adulterous ""black book."" He sets out to find the women in question, and to perhaps discover his father through the evidence of his sins, though what he finally unearths is both more honorable and more bizarre than anything he could have imagined. The unfolding tale is both a traditional mystery and a journey of introspection, the former shaped by oral history while the latter is governed by private memory. Both follow a pattern dictated by Jess's struggle to translate passages of Dante's Inferno, which acts here as a thematic chorus. Chappell studs his novel with autobiographical quirks (Jess writes under the pseudonym ""Fred Chappell""), and narrates with his trademark voice, one both poetic and inclusive of the idioms of the Appalachian Mountain region. Fans of Chappell (Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You; Brighten the Corner Where You Are) will find this an intelligent and rewarding if sentimental closure to the Kirkman cycle. (Sept.)