‘The Mammoth Cheese’ by Sheri Holman  (2003)

I have read on the Internet a couple of paeans to the ugliness of the cover of the novel ‘The Mammoth Cheese’ by Sheri Holman.  On the cover, we have a United States flag encrusted with cheese so that the stars and stripes barely show through the cheese.  Given the ugliness of the cover as well as the Young Adult sounding title, I think more than a few readers may have stayed away from this novel.

But ‘The Mammoth Cheese’ is not without its supporters.  It was on the 2005 shortlist for the Orange Prize. 

A few years back, I read Sheri Holman’s ‘The Dress Lodger’ which was one of my favorite novels I read that year.  ‘The Dress Lodger’ is an historical novel taking place in a cholera-stricken town in England during the 1830s.  Now, seven years after its publication, I’ve finally gotten to Sheri Holman’s next novel, ‘The Mammoth Cheese’.

This time out, Sheri Holman goes the modern United States realistic fiction route.  This is Anne Tyler territory.  It takes place in a small town in Virginia, Sheri Holman’s birthplace, not far from Tyler’s Maryland.  Here we have a modern American family with the enterprising mother, the drunk ex-husband, the possible boyfriend who helps on the farm and is secretly in love with her, and the hapless growing up daughter.  As friends of the family, we have the homespun but wise Episcopal priest and his adoring homebody wife as well as a bunch of other gawky neighbors.

Sheri Holman is somewhat edgier than Anne Tyler.  One of the plot lines in ‘The Mammoth Cheese’ deals with the 8^th grader daughter getting inappropriately involved with her 33-year old teacher.

The characters in this novel seemed too familiar and stereotypical to me.  They all fit together a little too neatly into the tapestry of the novel, leaving out what mystery there might have been.  For me, the most annoying characters were the homespun Episcopal priest and his homebody wife and their Jefferson-imitating son.  There ought to be a law banning walking cliches from novels.  In other words, the good characters (the minister’s family, etc), are too good, and the bad characters (the school teacher and the ex-husband) are too bad.   

Before I mentioned Anne Tyler.  Even though Tyler’s stories are even less provocative than this one, Tyler’s characters are more mysterious.  You get the sense that Tyler’s main characters are too odd to fit in at all in their neighborhoods, yet by the end you appreciate their uniqueness and dignity.  In ‘The Mammoth Cheese’, a short phrase can wrap up each character, and there’s nothing more to say about them.       

There is a political component to the story, because Margaret, the mother in the family, is making the mammoth cheese which they are hauling to Washington to show her support for the guy she helped elect to be President who has vowed to save family farms.  Her possible boyfriend in the novel likes to dress up and speak as Thomas Jefferson, so there are a lot of references to Jeffersonian ideals. In the United States, the time is right for a strong political satire that would get to the root of the severe problems of the new century, and I hope there is someone out there courageous and talented enough to write that book.   This novel is not it, but rather this novel is a small town romance and tragedy with a sprinkle of politics thrown in for good measure.

The novel did hold my interest throughout, and Sheri Holman is a talented writer.  I would have appreciated a deeper more profound insight into the people of a small town in the United States today.