How Far She Went

Mary Hood’s first collection of short stories, How Far She Went, was published in 1984 and won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review/Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award. This study guide refers to the University of Georgia Press edition published in 1984. Four stories in the collection first appeared in The Georgia Review: “A Country Girl,” “Doing This, Saying That, to Applause,” “Manly Conclusions,” and “Inexorable Progress.” The opening story, “Lonesome Road Blues,” first appeared in The Ohio Review. The final story, “Inexorable Progress,” was selected for publication in the Houghton Mifflin Company anthology The Best American Short Stories 1984. Narrated in the third person, these stories portray a quintessential Southern pastoral backdrop against which Hood juxtaposes the characters’ conflicts over survival and acceptance.

Plot Summary

How Far She Went consists of nine stories, with the title story, “How Far She Went,” positioned at the center of the collection. The rural setting offers an illusion of pastoral innocence that ironically reveals a recurring, darker tone connecting these stories, which deal with the conflict of whether to accept living in sadness, loss, alienation, and isolation as the inescapable prelude to one’s inevitable death.

The central position of the title story is symbolically pivotal to the stories preceding and following, as “how far” the title story goes to confront that conflict—as seen through characters whose actions lead to the killing of a loyal dog—represents an abandonment of hope in the possibility of genuine happiness in life. The four stories preceding the collection’s climactic moment comprise a scrapbook of a simple, country life in which idyllic illusion muffles their characters’ resignation to endure suffering and loss.

In the opening story, “Lonesome Road Blues,” a lonely widow returns to an annual blues festival to seek the equally lonely blues musician with whom she became enamored while attending the festival the previous year. Her plan—to create a sanctuary for both by bringing him home—brings the pretense of not being alone, yet both of them are still aware of their solitude at the story’s end.

In the next two stories, the protagonists suffer loneliness, though in neither case are they alone. In “Solomon’s Seal,” the death of the family dogs leads to a couple’s divorce, but a sense of separation has been present since the marriage began. In “A Man Among Men,” the protagonist finds himself isolated amidst a respectable country family life. The fourth story, “A Country Girl,” depicts a quintessential Southern country family reunion, a picture-perfect portrait revealing complacent resignation and highlighting the thin illusion holding everyone together.

In the title story, “How Far She Went,” a woman chooses to silence her barking dog by drowning him to escape two bikers intent on killing her granddaughter, who brought on this danger in an act of rebellion. It is a tragedy made poignant by its protagonist embracing her fate—she believes it is her fault for choices she made earlier in life—and the four stories following the collection’s tragic climax portray the very opposite of that earlier resignation. These characters, instead, confront the meaninglessness and hopelessness of life and seize control of loss and death by seeking and pursuing its end at any cost.

“Doing This, Saying That, to Applause” tells the story of a man whose superficial success ends in suicide after he is arrested for a secret, criminal life. “Manly Conclusions” continues this idea of taking control of death with the story of a couple’s son avenging the killing of the family’s beloved dog. In “Hindsight,” a female protagonist seizes control of a failing marriage by forcing its end. The protagonist of the final story, “Inexorable Progress,” seizes control of her desperation by attempting to end her own life following the death of the family’s dog.