Book Review: Serena

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1930s, gone girl, literary fiction, north carolina, ron rash, serena, southern fiction

Ron Rash’s Serena artfully captures the beauty and brutality of life in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1930s. The novel provides historical perspective on the clash between business interests and environmentalism that still runs hot today.

However, the real force of nature in Serena is the book’s namesake, a woman whose ambition and cruelty mow over rivals just as swiftly as her husband’s logging company takes down hardwoods in the mountains outside Waynesville, North Carolina.

There is a scene early in the novel that indicates just how formidable a character Serena Pemberton will be. It’s the end of another long day at the Boston Logging Company. George Pemberton, his new bride and his business partners are relaxing with a few drinks. At this point in the story, Serena has already humbled her husband’s abandoned lover. Her courage and toughness have won the respect of the working men in the logging camp. But the company’s managers are not impressed with George Pemberton’s young wife—it is the 1930s, after all. The camp physician, Doc Cheney, mirthfully praises Serena for being unusually logical for the “the fairer sex.”

Serena gives the doctor a cutting response.

“My husband tells me that you are from these very mountains, a place called Wild Hog Gap,” Serena said to Cheney. “Obviously, your views on my sex were formed by the slatterns you grew up with, but I assure you the natures of women are more various than your limited experience allows.”

If you think Serena is striking a blow for women’s rights, you might want to hold your applause until the book’s end. Doc Cheney and many others will soon learn that Serena transcends any gender, that she may even be a creature of mythical powers.

I saw Ron Rash speak at a book conference in 2014. He said then that his creative process involves many, many rewrites—sometimes 20 to 30 revisions of a single short story. That craftsmanship and attention to detail pay off in Serena, which combines beautiful prose with vivid characters and a suspenseful, harrowing plot.

In Serena Pemberton, Rash has created an epic persona of uncompromising villainy. If you thought that Amy Dunne in Gone Girl was frightening, you really should check out Serena.

Book Review: The Night Train

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1960s, back bay books, book review, civil rights, clyde edgerton, dunn, family, fiction, little brown, north carolina, novel, segregation, southern fiction, Stephen Roth, the night train

Some of my fondest childhood memories were the trips we made to Dunn, North Carolina, to visit my mother’s family. I would sit in the kitchen of Grandma’s house or in front of her massive RCA color television in the back room, listening to my aunts and uncles reminisce about life growing up in a small tobacco town in the 1950s and 60s. There was a lot of laughter and the occasional heightened pitch of my mother or one of her sisters recounting a particularly juicy part of a story. Everyone on my mother’s side of my family was a good storyteller, so I guess I come by that honestly.

Reading The Night Train, Clyde Edgerton’s 2011 novel about a small town in the early 1960s, reminded me of Dunn and some of those raucous tales at Grandma’s house. Fictional Starke, North Carolina, is like countless other Southern hamlets before and after Segregation – railroad tracks splitting it into the white part and the black part of town, with little overlap between the two other than in the tobacco fields and at a few businesses. Despite the separation and the history, Edgerton notes, folks on both sides of the tracks seem to share more in common than they would care to admit:

We could accurately say that the railroad divided a community of cornbread, vegetable and chicken eaters; or a community of pet lovers; or a community of rural dialects; of families of men who hunted quail and rabbits; people who owned chickens; women who cooked and sewed; or people who had, in their lifetimes, “worked in tobacco” – picked it, carted it behind mule or tractor, tied it to sticks, hung it in barns to cure, took it to market, complained about suckering and sand lugging.

Sunday mornings, however, encapsulate just how far apart the two sides of town are:

The truths of their pasts gave each group a different God (one of deliverance, the other of dominion), a different mode of worship service (one with energy and joy trumping solemnity and fear, the other almost reversing that). And their histories brought hardships to the people of West Starke not understood by the people of East Starke, and guilt to the East not understood by anybody.

Somehow, despite their upbringings and social pressures of their town, two teen-aged boys – one black and one white – slowly become friends. As with a lot of kids suddenly old enough to form their own tastes, it is music that brings them together. Dwayne Hallston has discovered James Brown and instructs his all-white band to memorize every song on the Live at the Apollo album. Larry Lime paces Dwayne through James Brown’s dance moves, but Larry Lime’s real passion is piano jazz, which he’s learning from a hemophiliac musician called the Bleeder who plays a club on the outskirts of town.

Both Larry Lime and Dwayne love The Bobby Lee Reese Show, a local TV variety show featuring the latest country and rock acts every Saturday night, hosted by a transplanted Yankee with a strange knack for connecting with both white and black audiences. Dwayne wants to audition on Bobby Lee’s show, and what could possibly go wrong with white boys playing soul music on TV at a time when the South is about to erupt over Civil Rights?

At little more than 200 pages, The Night Train is a fast-moving, often hilarious trip along both sides of the railroad tracks in tiny Starke. Edgerton’s skill at developing characters is such that even the most vilely racist ones come off as strangely sympathetic. They’re not bad people, they are just products of a tightly wound caste system that still exists in pockets of small towns and big cities all across the country.

You know from the very beginning of the book that the blooming friendship between Larry Lime and Dwayne is bound to be tested. Along the way, however, there are wonderful boyhood adventures and vivid characters of all ages. And, as with all of Edgerton’s books, there’s some great storytelling. You can almost taste the fried chicken, green beans and buttered biscuits on Grandma’s kitchen table, no matter what part of town you’re from.

R.E.M. and the New World

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1980s, 1985, alternative rock, athens, atlanta, fiction, georgia, high school, music, north carolina, r.e.m., rock, Stephen Roth, u2

Looking back on it, Crawford Connelly was kind of a prick, but he did Grady one enormous favor: he introduced him to music.

“You’re from Georgia, right?” Crawford asked on their first ride to school together.

“Yeah,” Grady said, even though he hadn’t lived there in six years.

“You like R.E.M.?”

“Sure, man.” Grady wasn’t certain he had heard correctly, but he thought Crawford must have meant R.E.O. Speedwagon, which Grady did, in fact, like. He’d been listening to the Wheels Are Turnin’ album for most of the summer.

Crawford pulled an unlabeled, dark grey cassette from the car’s console and popped it into the player. From the custom-installed Bose speakers came a jingly-jangly guitar riff that sounded nothing like anything produced by R.E.O. Speedwagon.

Crawford lit a cigarette while waiting to turn onto Battlefield Road, which would take them to Church of Christ Presbyterian School, where Grady’s mom had recently enrolled him in the hopes of securing a quality, private school education.

“I dunno, man. I still like Murmur the best,” Crawford said between songs. “What’s your favorite?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your favorite R.E.M. album?”

“Oh,” Grady said, staring at his book bag. “Probably Murmur, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Crawford said, taking a drag from his Camel. “It’s pretty awesome.”

It did not take long for Crawford Connelly to deduce that his passenger knew nothing about the emerging band scene coming out of Athens, Georgia, nor much else about music beyond whatever shit was on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown. Crawford probably knew this from the moment Grady stepped into his car. The kid was wide-eyed, ruffled and hopelessly unstylish in his dress and speech. The recent switch from glasses to contact lenses had only slightly improved his appearance. Grady looked like what he was: a skinny, nerdy, terrified high school freshman, product of a single mom who lacked either the time or awareness to inform him that wearing a blue and white collared shirt with hexagonal patterns to the first day of class was decidedly uncool in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1985. Or any place in any year, for that matter.

Crawford took Grady under his wing, at least during the 15 minutes of drive time each morning from their neighborhood to the school parking lot. Once they were in the lot, Grady was on his own. Crawford would light up another cancer stick with one of his letter-jacketed buddies, and Grady would skulk into the classroom building. But the morning drives in Crawford’s Chevy Caprice were Alternative Rock 101: starting with the R.E.M. albums of the day—Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction (which Crawford thought was their weakest effort) and the debut EP Chronic Town. Pretty soon, they moved on to the B-52s and more obscure bands like Drivin’ & Cryin’, Guadalcanal Diary, Jason & the Nashville Scorchers and White Animals. By the time R.E.M. came out with its next release, Life’s Rich Pageant, Grady was primed and ready. Exercising his newly acquired learner’s permit, he drove to the Record Bar and bought the tape the first chance he got, and spent much of the following weekend holed up in his room, trying to jot down and decipher the mysterious lyrics (“Fall on Me,” as far as he could tell, had something to do with the environment).

A few weeks later, when his mother forbade him from driving down to Atlanta with his new friends and watching R.E.M. play the Fox Theater as part of its Work tour, he again retreated to his room, grabbed the first thing he could get his hands on (a Trivial Pursuit box) and hurled it against the wall. The surprisingly large sheetrock dent it left was a stark reminder throughout his teenaged years that, despite getting good grades and mostly staying out of trouble, he was still a prisoner in his own home. “Welcome to the Occupation,” indeed.

Junior year came around, and this time Grady would not be denied. He would travel to the Omni in Atlanta to see U2 on its Joshua Tree tour. He would never forget that show, the very first concert he ever attended: the opening organ strains of “Where the Streets Have No Name” filling the arena, then a spotlight shining on The Edge as he took the stage, then a familiar voice that was both current and already iconic at the same time, “I want to run, I want to hide…” Grady looked next to him at Emily Duncan, a sophomore whose parents had, inexplicably, allowed her to travel ten hours, round-trip, in a Honda Civic crammed full of beer and teenagers. They were in the Omni’s upper deck, but Emily’s face glowed as if Bono were a few feet away, singing just to her. Grady badly wanted to kiss Emily Duncan, and he would attempt that maneuver a few hours later in the parking lot of a Denny’s. It was too late at that point. The magic of the show had faded for her, and she just wanted to get back home to her boyfriend.

There would be many more shows, including R.E.M.’s Green Tour in 1989, which wasn’t as life-altering as Grady had expected. The band had already made it big at that point. They were no longer a secret discovery shared by him and the self-possessed, nicotine-breathing soccer star who carpooled him to school every day. That was okay. R.E.M. had been the first, the one that opened his eyes to a new world where music could be cutting, raw and angry, or even moody, sly and cerebral. It could be many things, and it could be about so much more than just liking some girl.