Charley Bland

by Mary Lee Settle

In this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel's narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Graduate of Sweet Briar College. Winner of the National Book Award in 1978 for Blood Tie.

Reviews

[Connie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We rounded the great curve to the country club, the place where we had all grown up, where all our ceremonies of innocence had happened, weddings, betrayals, seductions, gossip, holidays, parties, all there under the wide trees, and up the grand staircase of what had once been Mr Slingsby's mansion."

The thirty-five-year-old narrator and aspiring writer is back in her hometown in West Virginia. She reconnects with Charley Bland, still the town's most eligible bachelor. Unfortunately, there is a third person in their love relationship - his mother.

The book is very atmospheric, set in a coal mining town with upper-class mine owners in exclusive neighborhoods, while those in the lower strata reside in cabins tucked away along the mountain roads. It is doubtful if there will ever be a permanent place for her in Charley Bland's life, and the country club set knows it.

I enjoyed the portrayal of the family relationships and small town society, although I didn't feel a strong connection with the characters. There was some lovely writing by Mary Lee Settle that kept me reading through a very slow-moving story.

[John Tipper · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel with an unusual structure, Charley Bland reads like a journal or a memoir. It has the ring of truth, like a Roman a Clef. Julia, a 35 year-old widow has been living in England and Paris as a bohemian writer. She decides to come home to her parents in Canona, West Virginia. A high-class, intellectual, independent woman, she reads Tolstoy, Carl Jung, and Martin Buber. She likes lively conversation but doesn't find much back home. She as a 14 year-old had had a crush on Charley Bland, who is ten year her senior. He's a drunk and a womanizer. His family has money from the coal mining business. They start an affair. The conflict of the book arises from Mr. Bland, who dotes on her son. She's the antagonist in the love triangle. It took me a while to warm up to this novel. Settle's philosophical musings slow the narrative down. But then I got into it. Class shapes the behavior of the characters. Julia battles to find her place in a society dominated by men. It reminded me of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Jean Genet's The Thief's Journal, in that they too seemed true accounts. Charley had some weak character points but he had some good traits as well.

[Cienna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like many other reviews on this book, I thought this book fit the name. Bland. I didn't feel like I grew or learned anything about this character. It seemed to me as if I was reading someone's journal on completely normal every day activities. The woman/narrator seemed to be heavily depressed, but not as much so as the rest of the town. The deaths in the book were one sentence events, and although the author said they had an effect on the characters, it did not feel genuine. Perhaps this era of writing is not my cup of tea, or I am not old enough to understand the nuances of the book, but generally I would not suggest it to anyone and did not enjoy it whatsoever.

[andra t. · Rating 3 out of 5]

it’s good but it might’ve only seemed so good because i read most of it in a patio nook with climbing vines and a hole in the wall filled with stranger’s notes.

[Pammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story is a memoir of sorts told from the narrator's point of view. A love story centered in the social setting of the south in the 1960's. We learn that in this small coal town of West Virginia social status is determined by "when you made your money, or how long ago you had lost it."
The trademark prose of Ms Settle can read like poetry, or may occasionally feel pretentious & tedious in her descriptions.
But the Settle you will relish and cherish is her simple, soul-bearing passages that make you weep. She skillfully weaves relatively unremarkable words into sentences so vivid you can feel the weight of them in your heart.
Examples: On a visit to comfort a grieving friend> "Those were the first weeks of the early spring, that time that seems never to end, a time of broken promises, when the sun brings out the first shots in a day, and the wind beats them, and the afternoons turn gray."
As the narrator describes her love> "For us to touch each other, to fall close upon each other, was not lustful but an extension of the language of love by other means. It was a growing together into body bloom, into the yes we lived no other time, not in public, not in the fear that kept us apart...... As I lay beside him, cool and weightless, I can still, after so long, see the night outside the windows........The final act of trust is not lovemaking, for lust can drive you there. It is to lay down your arms and sleep, unprotected. Sleep then is a brave act, lying awake floating in the joy you might lose is braver."

[Vel Veeter]

I didn’t know going in that this was a companion piece to The Killing Ground, but it is and while neither is dependent on the other, they make for a comfortable and complimentary reading experience.

In The Killing Ground the main action of the novel or the main narrative takes place in 1978 as Hannah comes home. In that time, a local Lothario named Charlie Bland dies in his 70s, and the town kind of mourns with a wistful and admiring set of feelings.

There’s reference from Hannah of the time Charlie seduced her.

In this novel, and note the name change, we have a version of that story, but one that doesn’t 100% sync up with the other novel. We have an unnamed narrator returning home at 35, recently widowed and out of sorts, and realizes that though she doesn’t want to marry the local Lothario Charley Bland, she might find some use for him yet. While it’s named for him and is ostensibly the story of his affair with the narrator, this is still very much her story. Calling it after him is more about showing the ways in which, given his stance and presence in the town, the narrator is still in control and we understand through her narrative the other side of the story. Also, Charley Bland is a real mama’s boy in this one, and his strange and possessive relationship with his mother (especially given that he’s 45) colors this story and creates the only external tension in the story.

[Sparrow .]

I've never struggled with a book as I did with "Charley Bland." Even the title -- even the name of the writer -- (Mary Lee Settle) jolts me with ambivalence. And the plot, or the lack of plot. The setting -- which I didn't realize was West Virginia, till after it was over. (I thought Virginia, maybe.) It's a very Southern novel. Can a novel be TOO Southern? If it can, then this is the one.

Yet you learn much about the South -- at least the West Virginian version of the South. The texture of winter, and its deep snows (in 1960). The strange all-male society of Korean veterans who live in a decaying house by a forded stream. The most amazing fact: many Confederate soldiers also fought for the North! They would be captured, and given the option to enter the Northern army! They fought against their own brothers, to survive, and carried their shame to their grave. Luckily, they had a little Jack Daniels to slightly neutralize the shame.

Oh, the South! How I love you, without being forced to endure your brittle upper-class supper parties!

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read and what a glimpse into small-town southern life in the coal-hills of WV. I was fascinated by the love story, which in many ways is quite mundane but lovely and vivid in Settle's telling of it. These are like characters I've known along the way.....

[Denise Schlachtaub · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, the power in this book lies in the author's beautiful prose; her descriptions of small town southern life, and her memories of a tragic romance are woven together to create a moving tapestry full of nostalgia and insight.