FICTION
“The Ron Rash Reader”
by Randall Wilhelm, editor
The University of South Carolina Press
416 pages, $54.95, hardcover / $24.95, paperback
“Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories”
by Ron Rash
Ecco, 448 pages, $27.99
At this year’s annual Decatur Book Festival in metro Atlanta, Ron Rash held an audience spellbound as he read from his story “3 A.M. and the Stars Were Out” and answered questions about his work and the craft of writing. Soft-spoken, with a pronounced Southern accent, he eventually got around to explaining that a much-anticipated new novel scheduled to come out this fall was not coming out after all.
A rustle of disappointment traveled through the crowded room, and then Mr. Rash wowed us with his talk, and we soon forgot everything but the fact that he was telling us how he’d solved a plot hiccup in his best-selling novel “Serena” by driving through the North Carolina mountains so fast he got pulled over for speeding.
Two “Greatest Hits” collections of Rash’s fiction, poetry and nonfiction ought to lessen the sting: “The Ron Rash Reader,” a generous sampler of all his books, and “Something Rich and Strange,” a compilation of selected favorites from four of his short-story collections.
Rash, born in Chester, S.C., grew up in Buncombe County, N.C. He attended Clemson University and now teaches at Western Carolina University, where he holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies. His first short-story collection, “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth,” was published in 1994; his most recent, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” came out last year.
He is a two-time finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and has won too many prizes to mention here, including two O’Henry Awards, the Thomas Wolfe prize and the prestigious Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for 2010’s “Burning Bright.”
“The Ron Rash Reader,” edited by Randall Wilhelm, provides an excellent opportunity to explore the full range of his work to date, with a selection of short stories drawn from five collections in the order they were published, excerpts from his five novels and four books of poetry, and several full-length uncollected essays and stories.
Wilhelm’s extensive introduction illuminates Rash’s themes, talks about his background, discusses his particular settings and the reasons he rarely strays far from his territory, and helps readers to see clearly how the collection demonstrates Rash’s deep love of Appalachia, its culture, history, and uncertain future.
My advice? You can go back later for the Rash 101 course. Skip the long, academic preface and dig right in.
No one writes better about the misunderstood, bedeviled, mule-stubborn inhabitants of Southern Appalachia than Rash, and his knowledge of the area is consummate. He’s fond of quoting Eudora Welty, who said, “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.” His ancestors, who have lived in the Carolinas since the 1700s, are often the inspiration for his characters, “lost voices who have been ‘erased’ from history.”
That said, Rash eschews traditional Southern stereotypes; as the LA Times once put it, “(Rash) refuses to lay on the corn pone.” There’s no sweet tea on his tables. No Mamas at home settin’ out cornbread and grits. Nobody says y’all. He doesn’t do dirty South either — that gritty subgenre that for so many other regional writers has captured the rapt attention of the rest of the world. You won’t find anybody cussing in his books; no picturesque drunks, incest or dog fights. His is the bluegrass South of defiant, almost courtly mountain people, the ones whose pride means more to them than life itself, whose ordinary, homespun lives yield, in Rash’s hands, the complicated workings of the human heart.
Not to say there isn’t danger, even brutality, here — as Wilhelm rightly points out, “with Rash’s characters, there are no easy answers — only tough choices, desperate schemes, and dances with the devil.” Still, he never makes a scene. When things go horribly wrong in Rash World, they do so with dignity, even if it’s a family of drug dealers reluctantly taking a machete to the kid who stumbled on their stash in the excerpt from “The World Made Straight.”
If you read the collection in order, by the time you get to the novels, you can see how they flesh out themes and characters found in Rash’s short stories and poems, a technique Wilhelm calls “recycling.” For instance, the first chapter of “One Foot in Eden,” a murder mystery set in South Carolina, contains hints of the poems in “Raising the Dead” that explored the flooding of the Jocassee Valley for hydroelectric power in the 1960s, a theme Rash would also touch on in his most recent novel, “The Cove.”
“The World Made Straight,” set in the 1970s, began as a story called “Speckled Trout” in “Chemistry and Other Stories” (2006). The same collection included “Pemberton’s Wife,” in which the enchantingly murderous heroine of “Serena” first sprang to life. Three chapters from it and his latest novel, “The Cove,” fill out the bill.
Rash’s focus on the long-lost, vanished world of Southern Appalachia, the destruction of the rural environment and its effect on the people there, is something he bears witness to in almost everything he writes. When a character describes the author of “Bartram’s Travels” in “One Foot in Eden,” he might easily be describing Rash himself:
“He understood that things disappeared. Maybe that was why he’d felt compelled to preserve with sketches and words everything he saw, from Cherokee council-houses to buffalo bones. He wanted to get it all down. He wanted things to be remembered.”
Of the new, unpublished and uncollected nonfiction in “The Reader,” a piece about troubled country musician/songwriter Gary Stewart is a standout. Rash shares some of his formative years in two charming and revealing essays about writing, one of which explains how a stutter led to a deeper understanding that “loops and lines made from lead and ink could be just as communicative as sound.” Three short tales of childhood and coming of age — “Outlaws,” “The Far and the Near” and “The Gatsons” — hold their own, but the rest come across as little more than ideas awaiting further development.
As an antidote of sorts to the delayed novel, HarperCollins has rushed out “Something Rich and Strange,” also in the Best Of tradition, which comes out in November. With 32 stories culled from Rash’s short fiction — “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth,” “Chemistry,” “Burning Bright” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” — it’s a bonanza for short-story fans, and another great introduction to Rash for those who haven’t read the originals yet.
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