To the residents of Three Chimneys, Va., manufacturing a 1,235-pound block of cheese is not merely a desperate expression of confused patriotism. It's an attempt to reunite a small town torn apart by grief - even as it threatens to tear the community apart.

Sheri Holman's third novel, The Mammoth Cheese, begins with the simultaneous birth of 11 babies to Manda and Jake Frank, a rather stereotypical white-trash couple that underwent fertility treatments. Three Chimneys suddenly finds itself in the media spotlight while gifts and pledges of support rain down on the Franks from all corners of the globe.

Pastor Vaughn, who counseled Manda not to have a selected reduction procedure which would have allowed her to have fewer but healthier babies, makes it a personal mission to help care for the sickly infants. Manda, depressed and confused, retreats not only from the spotlight, but also from her newborn children.

But the Franks aren't the only ones having a hard time in Three Chimneys. Margaret Prickett, whose husband left her a year ago, struggles to run her dairy farm while raising her 13-year-old daughter Polly. With cheese sales down and only the pastor's son August to help her - along with her ex-husband's failure to pay child support - Margaret faces foreclosure and doom.

Hope for Margaret rests in Adams Brooke, the Virginia governor and presidential candidate who pledges amnesty for all small farmers as part of his "Family Matters" campaign. Margaret becomes obsessed with the campaign and spends all her free time volunteering. But as she does so, she ignores the shy advances of her lovesick farmhand and neglects Polly, who has fallen in love with her Marxist, ex-radical history teacher Mr. March.

As Brooke becomes president and Manda's babies begin to die off, Pastor Vaughn comes up with a publicity stunt to help heal the community: Re-create the making of the 1,235-pound "Mammoth Cheese," which was given as an election present to Thomas Jefferson in 1802, and deliver it to President Brooke as a thank-you for saving the small farmer. Margaret eventually concedes and, with the help of August (a Jefferson scholar and impersonator himself), begins to make the Mammoth Cheese.

Holman continues in the tradition of her previous novels - the widely acclaimed A Stolen Tongue and The Dress Lodger - by steeping her story and characters in history. As August notes in the book, "What better way to learn history than to engage in a dialogue with it? Than to prod it and demand it explain itself?" Holman weaves American history - and particularly Jeffersonian history - into the narrative of The Mammoth Cheese and shows how the personal can be political and the political can be very, very personal.

And although Holman sometimes takes the fire out of a scene by switching the narrative's point of view a bit too frequently, she does an outstanding job of giving each character a unique and compelling outlook on life. Here, Polly retreats into her thoughts as her parents argue about the missing child support payments:

"She'd seen the complicated equation the court had used: her father's income minus any other alimony or children he was supporting, figured somehow against her mother's income plus any exceptional health care costs and day care, divided by her father's age, blah, blah, blah. The court had calculated her like a mortgage and come out with the sum of $490 a month. Not $500, a satisfying figure in her mind, the respectable burnt orange of Monopoly money, but $490, a savings to her father of ten dollars, snipped off each month like a lock of hair."

As the Mammoth Cheese hardens over months and the town prepares to deliver it to Washington, Three Chimneys begins to unravel. August separates himself from his family, Margaret, and the cheese itself - which has become trivialized by all the corporate sponsorship, Internet cheese-cams, and media attention. Polly drifts further from her mother and dangerously close to Mr. March, who encourages her to declare independence in her own Jeffersonian sort of way. President Brooke, it is said, plans to sell out the small farmer and give up on his Family Matters Act. And the history-making babies, the Frank Eleven, continue to decrease in number.

Holman weaves all these stories together so well that it takes only a few chapters for the reader to feel like a native of Three Chimneys. After that, The Mammoth Cheese moves quickly and effortlessly toward its surprising and memorable climax.

Most impressive, however, is the way Holman intermingles the Mammoth Cheese as both a historical object and a symbol of American excess with the plight of her characters. Musing on sliced American cheese, Holman writes, "Polly had always wondered, along with Margaret, that her country would name such a processed and unnatural product after itself."

In the end, it becomes clear: The Mammoth Cheese is about politics, history, religion, love, money, excess and independence - in short, it's about all things American.

And what could be more American than a 1,235-pound block of cheese?



Jay Pawlowski is a freelance writer living in Denver.