Fear, loathing in Appalachia
Rash captures the human failings that lead to tragic destinies
Anew Ron Rash novel captures how outcasts become the “others” — and the price they pay,
Over the past decade, American author Ron Rash has steadily built a reputation for himself. The critical promise of his early novels, Saints at the River and The World Made Straight, and his PEN/ Faulkner Award-nominated collection Chemistry and Other Stories, was fully realized with his best-selling 2008 novel Serena, which chronicled the rise and fall of the ambitious wife of a Depression-era lumber baron. Set in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it offered readers a villainess every bit as ruthless as Lady Macbeth herself.
The geography is familiar to Rash, whose forebears in the southern Appalachians can be traced back more than two hundred years. And like other southern writers before him — Faulkner, Welty, Wolfe — he has carved out his own fictional territory, a parcel roughly situated between the city of Asheville and the Tennessee line.
It is to this small corner of Appalachia that Rash returns with his newest offering, The Cove.
Like Serena before it, The Cove casts a backward glance. It is the autumn of 1918, and as the war in Europe rages on, fear and suspicion of the other takes hold on the home front. It is no different in Mars Hill, a small college town in Madison County, North Carolina.
Here Laurel Shelton and her brother Hank, who was wounded in the trenches of France, know very well what it is to be the other. The Sheltons, all but shunned by the townsfolk, keep to themselves, tending to the hardscrabble family farmstead that lies deep within the cove, “a cursed place [so] most people in the county believed.”
Cursed not only because “there wasn’t a gloomier place in the whole Blue Ridge,” or even because it was “a place where ghosts and fetches wandered,” but also because of Laurel herself, whose face is stained by a large birthmark that locals believe to be the sign of a witch.
Into Laurel’s dark and lonely world stumbles Walter Smith, a stranger with adangerous secret who carries with him a silver flute and a note that proclaims him a mute. It is the sound of the flute to which Laurel is initially drawn, “a sound so pure no breath need carry it into the world.” After Walter is attacked by a swarm of yellow-jacket wasps, Laurel nurses him back to health, and sees in him the possibility of a happiness that was until that point unimaginable.
Meanwhile, back in Mars Hill, Chaun- cey Feith, the local army recruiter and fortunate son of the town’s banker, harbours dreams of heroism. Dreams that manifest themselves in a campaign of intimidation against perceived enemies within — namely members of the local college that he brands Hun sympathizers.
There has always been a haunting inevitability to Rash’s stories — what happens is inescapable, it is fated, the wheel of fortune is set in motion and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. This Elizabethan sensibility — his lovers and others are star-crossed — was there in
Serena, and in his magnificent Frank O’connor Award-winning collection Burning Bright.
It is in The Cove, too, where there are indeed greater forces controlling the destinies of Chauncey and Walter and Laurel. But as Shakespearean as his tendencies may be, Rash makes us well aware that there is nothing otherworldly about the influences that shape the fortunes of these three — rather the Fates that spin and measure and cut the threads of their lives are the wholly human failings of fear and ignorance and bigotry.
Stephen Finucan is a Toronto novelist and short story writer.