Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, December 2002
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden (Novello Festival Press, $21.95) begins with an interesting mystery set in 1950s South Carolina. The sheriff knows that a local farmer has killed his neighbor. He knows that the neighbor was in the habit of wearing his military uniform in the middle of the day to visit the farmer's pretty wife. He knows that two shotgun blasts rang out the afternoon that the man disappeared.

All the sheriff needs is a body. But after he and his deputies scour every part of the farmer's land, even under a dead plow horse, they turn up nothing. It looks like the farmer has gotten away with murder.

At this point, Rash begins to explore the lives of the people leading up to the tragic day. Amy Holcombe wants a baby so bad that she'll take the advice of a granny-woman and lie down with her neighbor. Once she conceives a child, she refuses to see the neighbor again. When her husband, Billy, pulls the trigger, he decides what their fate will be.

Nearly 20 years after the murder, the story is told from the viewpoint of Amy and Billy's son, a young man who finally learns the truth about his birth father. Their farm in the Jocassee valley (Cherokee for "valley of the lost") is slowly being swallowed by impounded waters; eventually the land and buildings will be at the bottom of a power company lake. The son's search for his father's remains leads to a terrible event -- as well as a sense of closure.

Rash's characters have a heroic quality as they struggle to fill the empty spaces in their hearts. They also have a poetic intensity that speaks of a deep connection to the land.

When deep summer comes and the Dog Star raises with the morning sun, the land can scab up and a man watch his spring crop wrinkle brown like something on fire. It's the season snakes go blind. Their eyeballs coat over like pearls and they get mean.

Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700s. He is the author of three books of poetry, two collections of short stories and a children's book.

***

Brent Benoit's debut novel, All Saints' Day (Sewanee Writers' Series/Overlook Press, $26.95), is a dark, lyrical account of two generations of the Bueche family of Maringouin, La. As much as the characters try to escape the vicious cycle of poverty, emotional violence and disease, they can't. Their suffering and confusion is both exquisite in its intensity and as deeply embedded in their psyches as the Catholic ritual of the stations of the cross.

From childhood on, Russell wears blue-tinted glasses as a result of eye damage caused by his father. He sees a world in which "even his mother's face was colorless and dull." His emotional emptiness will be inherited by his children. One day his youngest son will believe that there are machine parts inside his stomach that he must cut out with a knife.

Russell's wife, Doreen, could have escaped this world with a college softball scholarship, but she is seduced into staying. Her oldest son, Whitaker, bears witness to her hard life, her long bout with cancer and his father's frequent absences. She gives birth to twins in the backseat of the family car that is stuck in traffic on a bridge over the Mississippi River.

They weren't from any city or parish but were born in the air, suspended above the cold river that ran dark and sparkled like swath of outer space.

A few years later, the much smarter twin -- perhaps the brightest prospect in the family -- dies when his feeble brother knocks him backward on a concrete fishing pier.

The novel unfolds in short vignettes, the ugliness of the world bathed in ethereal blues and greens. Moments of happiness and innocence are rare in this world of bayous and sugar cane fields, but they shine with an amazing grace because of Benoit's writing.

Benoit is a writing teacher at Louisiana State University and a homebuilder in Baton Rouge.

***

Mary Robison's collection of 30 stories, Tell Me (Counterpoint Press, $16), displays the talents of a writer who takes a minimalist approach to capturing the sound and feel of sophisticated, urban people. In her shorthand style, Robison nails those small, bone-jarring moments between people.

In "I Get By," a woman with three young children deals with the accidental death of her husband, an elementary school teacher. When she visits his classroom and meets his replacement, she notices something striking.

"Whenever I mentioned Kit, I nodded at his desk. When Andrea referred to him once, she gestured north. Toward the forest where the plane fell?"

In "Father, Grandfather," an anthropologist returns from an extended trip to her East Village loft, where her daughters are staying. The story reads like field notes.

I left the kitchen and hid; close, but in another room.

I heard Cammie say, 'Here're all the supplements we bought for her -- iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium. . . . Seals unbroken, soon to expire.'

Cake called out to me in a tone that made my cat leap: 'Mom! You cannot rely on food for nutrition! The soil your produce is grown in is worthless!'

Robison, a contributor to the New Yorker since 1977, is a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

***

Oradell Greengold is the brassy narrator of Meredith Sue Willis' Oradell at Sea (Vandalia Press, $22.50). She spends her days and her deceased husband's fortune cruising on first-class luxury liners where young Greek deckhands wait on her hand and foot-rub.

While aboard the Golden Argonaut from Acapulco to San Juan, Oradell describes her gritty Appalachian upbringing in a West Virginia coal-mining town. Her first husband, a passionate union organizer, was the love of her life. Her next husband showed her the seedy side of Las Vegas. In New York she got lucky with her third and last husband, whom she met while waiting on tables in a Greek restaurant.

In between reminiscences, Oradell befriends a jaded young California girl and spends more time with the Greek staff than with the other ship passengers. Oradell is a modern-day Mae West who unapologetically enjoys her wealth and its privileges, which includes boozing it up with the help. She never turns sloppy and sentimental, even when faced with a potentially life-threatening illness.
Willis, a native of West Virginia, is the author of 10 books.

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An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Dec. 29, 2002.