Appalachia-driven noir

If you want to understand “Trump country,” many booksellers will point you in the direction of J. D. Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” But David Joy, an acclaimed novelist known for Appalachian noir, begs to differ.

“The reason ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was so successful,” Joy wrote on Twitter, “was because time and time again Appalachia is brought up as a problem rather than a place. It’s because you wanted a (expletive) scapegoat and this was an easy place to point your finger.”

It’s personal for Joy, who’s lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for most of his adult life. He pushes back online against depictions of Appalachia as a “20 square mile island made up of two inbred, Confederate flag waving families.”

The Appalachian region, which stretches from northern Alabama to southern New York, is complex and diverse — full of joy, beauty and culture despite widespread poverty and other hardships. But you wouldn’t know that from Joy’s fiction. If anything, you’d think Appalachia was as grim and deadly as Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic wilderness in “The Road.”

Joy’s third novel, “The Line That Held Us,” begins with Darl Moody, a hunter who sneaks onto a neighbor’s land to poach deer out of season. When he fatally shoots a ginseng poacher after mistaking him for a boar, Darl calls best friend Calvin Hooper to help dispose of the body.

Unlike Joy’s earlier protagonists, these men aren’t connected to the local meth trade, the source of so much violence in “Where All Light Tends to Go” (2015) and “The Weight of This World” (2017). But

‘The Line That Held Us’

By David Joy, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 272 pages, $27

Darl and Calvin have another problem: the dead ginseng poacher’s older brother, Dwayne Brewer, is a villain straight out of a Coen brothers film.

We first meet Dwayne in a Walmart, “wearing a latex chimp mask he’d found on the floor by the Halloween decorations,” terrorizing a young mother out of sheer boredom between swigs of stolen beer. He’s a big man who makes a living stealing chain saws and flat-screen TVs. His father, Red Brewer, an infamous drunk, “drove right off the side of a mountain,” killing himself and Dwayne’s mother, “but it was neither an accident nor a shame.” Since then, Dwayne has had only his little brother, Carol, nicknamed “Sissy” for his gentleness.

When Dwayne finds Sissy’s car, he asks the neighboring landowner to check his camera, hidden in the trees to track wildlife. Once they identify Darl and Calvin carrying something heavy out of the forest the night Sissy disappeared, Dwayne begins plotting revenge.

Joy renders the Blue Ridge Mountains beautifully, at the peak of autumn, “with reds and oranges afire like embers, the acorns falling like raindrops.” But later on, he spends more time describing corpses than landscapes. The things that capture Joy’s attention are often grounded in the physical world. He devotes nearly a full page to the mechanics of fieldstripping a pistol, another half-page to the composition of a concrete block-laying crew, and is often preoccupied with what characters are doing with their bodies.

In her TED Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns of the “danger of a single story” about any particular people or place, especially when that story perpetuates stereotypes. Outside of his novels, it’s clear the single story Joy wishes to combat is the false notion that Appalachia is a homogeneous region full of bigotry and violence. And yet, within his otherwise powerful fiction, Appalachia’s real-life complexity and diversity aren’t often apparent.

The characters in “The Line That Held Us” are forced to commit violence because of the circumstances into which they were born or shoved. Perhaps Joy’s aim is akin to Richard Wright’s, whose breakout novel, “Native Son,” was criticized by some of his contemporaries for perpetuating the stereotype of black men as violent criminals. Through fiction, Wright showed how conditions on Chicago’s South Side could provoke a black man to murder without remorse.

Despite some shortcomings, “The Line That Held Us” is a suspenseful page-turner, complete with one of Joy’s signature killer endings.

Adam Morgan is the editorin-chief of the Chicago Review of Books and a contributing writer at Chicago magazine.