Ron Rash: The Caretaker

As close as I follow book news, I am rarely surprised when one of my favorite writers publishes a new book. I had been disappointed when I checked to see if Ron Rash would be appearing at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October and did not see his name. 

Then I had a message from a friend and former teaching colleague, telling me to be sure to read his latest novel, The Caretaker. I didn't hesitate. 

I have read everything Rash has written--full-length fiction, short stories, and poetry, since his novel One Foot in Eden won the Novella prize at the Charlotte festival. Though there is often a darkness in his stories, it is never gratuitously so.  He also has the power to evoke some of the most memorable images of anyone I have read.

My students always responded to the stories in his collection Burning Bright. A favorite former student who discovered a love for reading after graduating high school read Saints at the River and The World Made Straight, then contacted me to say thanks for the recommendation.

This new novel by Rash is set during the Korean conflict, set in part on the battlefield, but primarily in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, the caretaker at the local cemetery, is semi-reclusive after his facial disfigurement, a result of polio, makes his the victim of stares at best and mockery from some of his more cruel peers. 

Initially, Jacob Hampton appears to be the protagonist. He disappoints his parents first by choosing to work in his father's mill rather than attend college. Then, against their wishes, he marries 16-year-old Naomi, who came from Tennessee for work in the Blowing Rock Inn instead of the local girl everyone expected him to marry.

Rash's artful plot timing keeps suspense throughout the novel. He also keeps his characters' integrity (or the lack thereof) consistent through the story, even when readers might expect a sharp plot twist. As I finished, I felt satisfied that Rash had been true to the people he created.

Ron Rash: The Caretaker

I Am a Town: Shari Smith Strikes a Chord

While I spend a lot of time reading literature set in faraway places and long ago times, something feels right when I read a book that takes me to a familiar place. Shari Smith's memoir I Am a Town from River's Edge Media is a collection of stories that intertwine her own life with those of the good people (and even some not-so-good) in Claremont, North Carolina, her adopted hometown for many years.

Since I have lived just a few miles from Claremont--first in Granite Falls and then Hickory--for twenty years now, reading the book felt like memory, even though she's writing about her life and her people, not mine.  I'll admit, sometimes as she names names, they are my people too, especially when she mentions some of the local musicians--Reggie and Ryan Harris, Jaret Carter, Michael Reno Harrell.  The other characters, though, feel like people I know, have known.These are the people you meet in a small town if you take the time to sit down and listen.
Smith has done just that; she's paid attention to everyone from the Police Chief to man at the grill and the one-at-a-time-thank-you town drunk.

When I teach composition and literature, I like to talk about writing style.  Students understand music style and clothing style. They sometimes have a harder time understanding writing style, so I like to highlight certain writers.  Along with the obvious classics, I like to share writing by Tim O'Brien (the writer, not the musician), David Sedaris, and others who have a distinct voice.  Reading Shari Smith's writing feels like listening to her talking. Her diction, her knack for details rings true.

She opens the book by recalling the day fire destroyed the house she loved, turning her focus to all the people of the town who came to help, to comfort.  Chapter by chapter, she brings individuals to life--the boys at the back table at the cafe, the owner, the cook who talks to no one but her, Rev. Col. Russell Boggs of St. Mark's Lutheran Church, who insisted Smith speak at his funeral, read something from To Kill a Mockingbird and be funny.

I Am a Town kept hitting almost all my buttons.  I didn't think anyone else loved Harper Lee's one perfect novel as much as I did; I may have met my match.  Her enthusiasm that brought Rick Bragg to town to help raise money for a library were so familiar too. The clever, sometimes veiled allusions to books and music felt almost like a puzzle.  Not only is the title a song reference, but many of the titles are as well: "Carolina Girl," "Money for Nothin'," "The People You Meet They All Seem to Know You, "The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness."

Smith manages to invite readers into her life, introducing them to her son, her grown daughter and her family, her home and barn, to good dogs, great neighbors.  She made me laugh out loud as she described the two Lutheran Churches on the same street with competing nativity scenes, and then she made me cry when she told about her son Walker and his friends getting up from a televised Tar Heels basketball game, washing the blue paint off their face to say goodbye to a friend who lived years longer than doctors predicted.

Through the book, she makes no bones about her own beliefs and opinions, while treating those who disagree with more than tolerance, with respect and love. I wanted to stop reading, call my dad, and read aloud the chapter about guns.  In fact, I had different chapters earmarked for different friends; I knew plenty of people I am telling, will tell to read this book. Read it right now.

I Am a Town: Shari Smith Strikes a Chord

Lookaway, Lookaway

Most Southern family stories are set in small rural towns in the distant, if not the faraway, past.  Wilton Barnhardt's newest novel Lookaway, Lookaway is plopped down right in the middle of Charlotte, North Carolina, over the last decade, and the family Johnston and Jarvis families at the center of the story are far removed from tales of sharecroppers and hardscrabble living.  Instead, he shifts back and forth among the members of a family at the center of Charlotte society but at the end of their fortune.

The book opens as the younger daughter Jerilyn heads to UNC in Chapel Hill, determined against her mother's wishes to pledge a sorority--and not even her mother's staid sorority but the edgy Sigma Kappa Nu, referred to as Skanks, even by the members themselves.  If the first chapter or two reads like an episode out of the movie American Pie or Animal House, readers can expect it to zig and zag quickly.  Jerilyn's parents, Duke and Jerene Jarvis Johnston are living in a home in moneyed Charlotte, where he has a Civil War room holding his collection of guns and collectibles from the period.  He actively organizes and participates in a reenactment of a minor Skirmish just over the state line in South Carolina, and financial pressures move him to collaborate with developers who convince him they plan to preserve the field as a historical landmarks, keeping houses tastefully distant.  The agreement is closed with a gentleman's handshake, but these men are not gentlemen.

Barnhardt introduces every possible current controversy, particularly those hotbed topics in the South, with each new character.  While Jerene manages the family's trust at the Mint Museum of art, her brother Gaston Jarvis churns out a series of highly successful but hardly literary Civil War novels, failing to live up to his early promise, and never actually writing the novel he and his brother-in-law and college friend Bo Johnston dreamed up in Durham, Lookaway, Dixieland.  He spends his days in the bar at the country club to which he gained membership because of his Johnston family connections.

The Johnston's gay son Josh works in a men's clothing and searches the internet for potential  African American liaisons, usually under the watchful eye of his closest friend Dorrie, a black lesbian woman with an attraction to white society women. Meanwhile, his brother Bo pastors a prestigious Presbyterian church, aided by his wife Katie, who's just a bit too rough around the edges for her mother-in-law's tastes.  Rounding off the Johnston's siblings is the older daughter Annie, working through her third unsuccessful marriage as she builds a high profile real estate business in Charlotte.

The plot winds through the banking turmoil festering in Charlotte, the mortgage and housing decline, all with a balance between dark humor and tongue-in-cheek wit.  Barnhardt and his cast of characters manage to address race, gender, society, religious, financial scandal, literary rise and fall, university life, and politics.  At the heart, though, it is a family story.  With the huge ensemble cast, readers may find themselves reaching the final pages before deciding this is Jerene Jarvis Johnston's story most of all, particularly since she gets the literary last word.

Lookaway, Lookaway