Review: Ron Rash’s new book astounds

IndyWeek.com tells me what I already knew: that Ron Rash’s new book is a singularly impressive work. I’m running out to buy it right now. Rash teaches at Western Carolina University and he’s won numerous awards for his writing. Rash captures the mountain voice better than any writer out there. He’s better than Charles Frazier, in my opinion, because he’s more consistent and apparently more prolific. 

Rash will be at Malaprop’s on Sunday, Oct. 12, for a reading and book-signing.

Here’s more of what IndyWeek has to say about Rash’s new book, Serena. 

The novel is impeccably constructed, with the Pembertons’ story unfolding amid the death and dismemberment surrounding the timber business during the Depression. It isn’t long before Serena, powered by the twin engines of fury and fate, becomes the object of her own mythology among the camp’s workers, who function as a Greek chorus. Even their Appalachian storytelling tradition, however, can’t match what she is capable of.

As ruthless as she is, Serena’s singularity of purpose makes her a fascinating creature to watch, especially as she maneuvers around the environmentalists working to establish the area’s first national parks. (Rash borrows convincingly from history in places, inserting naturalist Horace Kephart and members of the Vanderbilt/ Cecil family as characters; to this day, descendants of the latter own the Biltmore House in Asheville.)

Each character’s actions have a frightening inevitability to them. Though Pemberton eventually realizes that his wife’s greed exceeds even his own, a part of him knows that he can’t stop what’s already begun. “He stepped to the precipice and looked down at the vast dark gash they’d made on the land,” Rash writes. “Pemberton stared at the razed landscape a long time, wanting it to be enough. … [He] … then let his eyes fall slowly downward, and it was as if he was falling as well, falling slow and deliberate and with his eyes open.”