FICTION
“Soil”
Jamie Kornegay
Simon & Schuster
368 pages, $26
East of the Delta floodplain, the Mississippi bottomland around Highway 7 is a place of bloody mischief. The hardwood forests have no virtue; even the flowers are assassins. It’s as if “the strange had become common under the upheaval of nature,” explains author Jamie Kornegay in “Soil,” his debut novel.
Muck, loam, gossip and goo stir in this orgy of rude shenanigans. A troubled young conservationist and his wife; a lascivious lawman; a vengeful briar-hopper limping around “the shaded contours of society,” hooked on pills and beer; all are slow-speed particles just about to smash one another to bits in Kornegay’s swamp collider.
For Jay Mize, “the trouble started with compost.” After college, he settles with his small family on a farm outside of Madrid, a north Mississippi university town. Jay has a job at the Farm Service Agency for a time and enjoys experimenting on his property with unconventional growing mediums, like soil-free farming. (“The future will be spotless!”)
The pleasure Jay took in these endeavors vanishes after his father’s suicide. He begins “reading books on end-time prophecies, mass extinctions and societal breakdown.” He builds a steel framed greenhouse lab “like an upturned rib cage of some extinct prehistoric beast.” His wife Sandy uncovers his “schematics for a network of underground bunkers… [that look] like an ant farm.” Jay believes a “comeuppance” is due for the general population; after the collapse, he’ll be secure from “the bleating mob” down the road in Madrid. Regrettably, in advance of Armageddon, the nearby Tockawah River overflows and completely destroys the grid of his dreams.
Throughout “Soil,” the “wild and portentous” Tockawah is ever-present, absorbing reality with swirling inscrutable purpose. Bayard County’s old-timers huddle in their Hilltop Grocery “coffee ring,” bitching about this and that, but if they have a grasp on anything, it’s the “fickle tolerance” of the river. Even Jay’s bonehead nemesis, Deputy Danny Shoals, tells him, “Just cause it’s your first time to get flooded don’t mean it’s the first time there’s ever been a flood.”
Kornegay has created an outstanding foil with Deputy Shoals, who is suspicious of Jay. He has an endless store of one-liners. (“I’ve got some stakeout work to do. Maybe get a steak while I’m out.”) His “lust [is] insatiable, his capacity to give pleasure unlimited.” Of course he’s chasing Sandy, among others, but when he’s caught filming the police chief’s wife taking a shower, his uncle, the Bayard County Sheriff, demands his nephew seek treatment at Garden Walk, the state’s leading “sex addiction” facility.
Buzzards and a bull gator add to the novel’s chorus of desperation, but it’s not all comic mayhem and manly pursuit. As her husband’s personal galaxy moves further into a field of dark energy, Sandy stabilizes the more farcical aspect of things, nurturing her son and caring for her Buddhist father, who is in a coma, while attempting to resist Shoals’ roguish ways. Kornegay’s humane rendering of Sandy’s pain allows him to skirt the temptation of nihilism, and it makes “Soil” a more ambitious book. “How did you work around that terrible family history that we’ve both married into,” Sandy’s mother-in-law asks her. “It’s the little bit we can do to leave it be.”
Whatever the source of Jay’s raging sense of persecution, “Soil” is a labyrinthine misunderstanding, mostly in Jay’s mind. Wandering his ruined grounds one afternoon, he stumbles across the corpse of a missing black man from Ohio. The afterburners of paranoia ignite, and — certain Deputy Shoals will make him responsible for the death — he disposes of the body in the manner of “the ancient rain forest tribes of Amazonia.” Adding to the complication, Jay is unaware he’s also being stalked by a pathetic, hopped-up “woodsman” named Leavenger, who becomes the catalyst for a chain reaction that resolves in the finale’s combat cloud.
Kornegay’s Jay Mize joins Americana’s parade of visionaries, often middle-class renegades, who sequester themselves from the corrupting influence of city life, only to become overwhelmed by the hardships of rural experience. The opposition of “town” and “country” has been a subject of several recent books reviewed in these pages, notably Mark Schimmoeller’s “Slowspoke” (a memoir of a cross-country unicyclist who finds reward in his parent’s back-to-the land belief system) and Ben Metcalf’s antithetical “Against the Country” (a novel that exercises the nuclear option on Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream). In its way, “Soil” takes the middle ground, its author loving the land but hating what it does to his hero, for whom he has much sympathy, his apocalyptic mania be damned.
