Buttermilk Bottoms by Kenn Robbins (University of Iowa: $15.95; 262 pp.)

Though they have never disappeared altogether from our national mythology, bumpkins--a fixture of 19th-Century American fiction--appear to be making a comeback. From places too small to be found on maps, these supposedly quaint, unsophisticated folks are the subject of a surprisingly large number of ‘80s novels--not to mention the stars of the celebrated ad campaign for Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers. For reasons not readily apparent, small places, “provincial” minds have lately renewed their mythological grip.

A first novel from Kenn Robbins, a playwright and drama professor at the University of South Dakota, “Buttermilk Bottoms” may prove to be the last word in bumpkin fiction. It would be difficult to invent a more diminutive place than Frog Level, S.C., home to Killie Willie Matt and his family until they migrate to Buttermilk Bottoms, a lethal white ghetto in an unnamed Northern city. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned and expertly plotted novel belongs to a subgenre of bumpkin mythology: the Southern rural white person as illiterate savage; sometimes noble but always primitive and culturally isolated. Yet again, one of the most enduring and vicious stereotypes in our culture has reared its ugly head.

Ironically, the author would have it otherwise. Unlike much recent fiction about rural Southerners, Robbins neither writes with condescension nor emphasizes the merely eccentric. Unlike Hollywood’s paranoid and sometimes ludicrous portraits of rural Southerners (films like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Deliverance,” TV shows like “Green Acres” and “The Dukes of Hazzard”), he captures much of the fatalism, humility, and--yes--tolerance of “backwoods” Southerners.

But unwittingly, Robbins reinforces hoary stereotypes: When they move from Frog Level to Buttermilk Bottoms, the Matts are remarkably naive, virtuous and primitive folk, free of scars from the poverty that has driven them from their farm, with no awareness whatsoever of life outside their own folk culture. No bitterness here. And, apparently, no TV sets.

From the outset, Robbins’ dramatic device of transplanting a family of bumpkins--Killie Willie Matt, his wife Cora New, his 23-year-old daughter Ollie Gus and adolescent son Vaughn Brodie--to a Northern ghetto groans with contrivance. A failed farmer, Killie Willie Matt is searching for a job in the big city when he wanders into a deli crowded with diners. Staring at the food, Killie Willie is “puzzled over the way that folks ate there in the city. Where in the world did it all come from?” Confronted by the owner, Joe Wiscovich, Killie Willie asks, “How do I do it?” “It? What’s it?” Wiscovich demands. “Get me something to eat,” says Killie Willie. “Well, hell,” replies Wiscovich, “try sitting down, why don’t you?”

If, in Hollywood parlance, “Buttermilk Bottoms” were a “fish-out-of-water” movie comedy, such nonsense might be explicable, if not amusing. But his novel aspires to--and relies on for its effects--a profound level of realism, particularly in Buttermilk Bottoms with its relentless poverty and violence. Later in the same scene, the deli erupts in condescending laughter when Killie Willie, explaining that he’s from a place called Frog Level, points toward the street and says, “It’s down yonder a piece.” “Killie Willie,” Robbins writes, pushing his bumpkin to the most implausible extreme, “couldn’t help but smile. It made him feel right proud that others--and so many of them too--could share in this joy over the memory of his home place.”

As one might expect, “Buttermilk Bottoms” is a survival story: how the Matt family, fragmented by an alien and hostile environment, pulls together when Killie Willie imports a touch of home, a pig named Perfecta from South Carolina. The Matts shelter Perfecta in an impoverished sty in the middle of the ghetto, defying city laws, heartless “pigs” (as the local policemen are called) assorted hoodlums and a humorously sketched, pork-loving wino named Nate. Not since Wilbur in E. B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” has the fate of a pig been so much the fulcrum of suspense. And Robbins is at his best--his most poignant--in scenes where various members of the clan, homesick and tormented by an incomprehensible environment, confide in Perfecta as to a priest or psychiatrist.

There are other vivid scenes--notably an ambush of rats in Perfecta’s sty--and Robbins has a feel for the grit of the inner city, the violence and vulnerability of its residents. Like Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” his evocation of poor, honest, uprooted rural Americans is essentially sentimental--but Robbins lacks Steinbeck’s command of social context and his dense, convincing specificity. One feels the South here as a place the author has researched rather than experienced.

It may be that Robbins wrote this novel as a kind of fable, a folk tale of sorts, purposefully sketching the Matts in broad legendary strokes, finding edification in the story of a clan that renews family pride and love for each other in the tender nurture and gallant defense of a pig. At times, though, his story is too naturalistic for legend; yet it is never detailed nor accurate enough to be a novel of profound realism. In the end, like the Matts and their pig, “Buttermilk Bottoms” gets caught in a strange no man’s land.