Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

Chuck Kinder's redneck roots have served him well. Last Mountain Dancer, his "meta-memoir," is taken up with his childhood home of West Virginia. Readers are treated to everything from his adolescent years as a bona fide outlaw, pulling armed robberies with a sociopathic father figure named Morris Hacket; to buying all his dear old mother's crocheted comforters from an "artsy-fartsy artiste type" proprietor of a craft store so that his mother, with months of no sales, wouldn't feel "lower than whale bowels on the bottom of the ocean;" to packing a half-dozen brazed possum sandwiches and long necked Budweisers and driving the West Virginia hills with his sister and brother-in-law; to his fascination with a paranoid West Virginia Elvis impersonator named Jessico White, the last mountain dancer of the title; to an impassioned defense of Sid Hatfield, the fabled coal miner's advocate murdered by West Virginian authorities in 1921. The book is stunning both for its honesty and for the force of his prose. Often, Kinder's most beautifully written prose accompanies descriptions of horrible events or the most painful self-discoveries. For example: "There was absolutely no private mythology left behind what passed for my personality. Not unlike other foolish, floundering middle-aged men, I didn't believe in a thing that seemed to matter. My life had broken down like an old heap on the highway" (Dancer, p. 139). And then, some two hundred pages later, "I had begun to fancy myself as one of those uniquely American types who define themselves primarily in the loss and betrayal of themselves and what they love. For Proust (a somewhat similar European type), the only true paradise was a lost paradise, and love was not fully itself until it was lost, until it became memory, became the stuff of story. At its heart, every story is about a lost world... ." (p. 349). After much soul searching and confronting of his foibles and doomed hopes, he decides to embark on a journey of self-discovery, aware of creating a new fable for himself and of his inconsistency: "I was deep into my fable of embarkment. I was sipping ice-cold vodka straight like a seasoned hardboiled ironist and vaguely wondering if my upcoming self-proclaimed voyage of self-discovery would be in truth simply another frivolous fiction of self-invention. Steadfastly true at least to my inconstancy, I sat there in the monastery of myself thinking that the only thing I ever knew for sure was what I made up" (p. 381). There is much to admire and enjoy in this book, written by the purported Grady Trip of "Wonderboy's" fame. Kinder has written three novels that also provide great literary experiences: "Silver Ghost," "Snakehunter," and "Honeymooners" (about his raucus life with Raymond Carver).