At the heart of this lovely first novel by Kentucky native Silas House are a psychological parent-hunt, a satisfying love story, and a broad swath of violence cutting through the characters' lives. The violence in Clay's Quilt, however, is essential to the story line and is never used in the romanticized portentous style of too many American novels and films. Clay Sizemore, the central consciousness, is a young Kentucky miner who lost his mother early and never knew his father. He is given to occasional hell-raising in the form of driving trucks too fast and drinking all night at honky tonks, but he also listens to classical music and has a highly developed appreciation of nature and the culture of his region. Readers of Clay's Quilt will be forced to reconsider their stereotypes of Appalachian people. One point-of-view character, a religious fundamentalist called Aunt Easter, is not made fun of, but is seen as having a talent at religious expression just as musicians express themselves through their instruments or voices. In this world, families gather at funerals, but they also get together and enjoy one another's company when the electricity goes off in a storm. Here children grow up sleeping in one uncle's house but eating across the way at the aunt's. Cousins share beds even into adulthood as a way of creating connection and human warmth. People have second sight and read Jeremiah in the Bible, but they also read To Kill a Mockingbird. They sing "Wayfaring Stranger" and listen to the ballads of Jean Ritchie but also enjoy John Mellencamp, Bob Dylan, and old recordings of Paganini. The quilter in Clay's family is not a woman but a man, and the novel's tortured artists are two musical sisters, Evangeline, a singer, and Alma, a gifted fiddler. This may be a different social setting from the reader's, but in Silas House's able hands, it quickly becomes an alternate home.
In the community of Clay's Quilt, moral and ethical dilemmas are not worked out in individual angst and isolation, but through the fabric of human relationships. Clay Sizemore's real project in the novel is not to find out how his mother died or how to get Alma to admit she loves him, but rather, how to create a life where his past, his character, his family, and his community are in harmony. Clay is gifted with a kind of natural goodness that puts him in the tradition of characters like Melville's Billy Budd and Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, but, happily, in this world, goodness does not carry the necessity of tragedy.
Clay's charm is that he seeks his answers and fights his fights, but focuses his creative energies on building a good life for himself and those he loves. He is most deeply wounded when he commits an act of violence that goes against what is natural to him. He is a satisfying hero because of his ability to give to the people around him: he is that most desirable of men–one who weaves together the threads of the social fabric. The quest of this hero and this book, then, is to find, continue, create, and recreate family and community -– to sustain a spiritual and material homeplace.