FICTION
“Against the Country”
by Ben Metcalf
Random House, 336 pages, $26.
When it comes to the tension between town and country, there is much to commend in the specialized footwear for either locale. Most of us can’t wait to get from one to the other and then back again, as fast as possible. But the gravity of American letters demands more profound, bitter conflict, which brings us to the case under consideration, Ben Metcalf’s debut “Against the Country,” a novel serving as fictionalized memoir, cocked to an oblique angle.
In ridiculous, sometimes pitiful vignettes, the author diminishes, to his credit, all sympathy for his unnamed teenage hero (which may be himself 30 years ago). If that makes him (or both of them) thoroughly unlikable, Metcalf, who was once a literary editor at Harper’s, couldn’t give a fig: He’s been planning this attack for a while.
Foremost, “Against the Country” is a painful story about an impoverished 1980s adolescence in Goochland, a tiny hamlet in Goochland County, Va. Located west of Richmond and “east of Jefferson’s labor camp on Monticello,” Goochland is a very real place, “lousy with the descendants of Huguenots.” (“O Goochland,” Metcalf writes, “O bed of agriculture’s deceit … in whose dirt our national evil was gestated.”)
The Metcalf family, in reduced circumstances, migrates from Illinois to the Piedmont countryside in the late 1970s. The reasons for the move are unclear; the decision may have been influenced by “degreed hippies,” “boosters of the simple life,” or perhaps “the continent’s cruel and continued work” upon the family tree.
From the outset, the Metcalfs occupy a dilapidated 19th century house next to an “enormous open-air trash pit.” The land itself is a “sadistic foe.” Their “gigantic atheist father,” well read, is an “ogre-king” who squeezes out a living as some sort of farmer; mom is an Ohio-born Catholic social worker. The narrator, who likes books, is regularly punched-up on the school bus.
“A great sorcery was at work all around us,” he observes. Tormenting rats, snakes and chickens on the property, he refines his juvenile sadism, even attempting to harness houseflies (“God’s clown airforce”), a stunt he hopes will win him a first at the science fair. He despises vegetables, corn in particular — “this false and most American of vegetables” — and engages in a dastardly assault on blackberries.
It should come as no surprise that “Against the Country” doubles as a splenetic manifesto with a theme that is precisely what its title implies. Metcalf is a bruised and bruising writer who hurls his gobs at the rural with gusto. He demonstrates an unprecedented contempt for the notion of boundless grandeur, constructing a crackpot theory, consolidated here: “I deny that town is the root of all harm to the these United States.” The Puritans’ fear of the natural world was so intense, he explains, “anyone who expressed an admiration for the woods … was likely to be dubbed a witch and set directly on fire. … How God was persuaded to leave town I do not know.”
Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman take it in the neck, but it all went wrong with the original arch-villain, Thomas Jefferson, “the rash ginger prophet.” Raised in Goochland County, this “architect of the American dirt clod” would “convince millions of Americans to martyr themselves on the altar of an agrarian delusion.”
Jefferson is denounced as a madman, “his idyllic hallucinations … a comfortable slaver’s dream of an agrarian wonderland.” And, Metcalf rails, “My object is, and only has been, that unclean and hideous root … (that) began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range … in order to reach and pervert California.”
This buffoonish tirade is the most delightful part of “Against the Country,” and it affords a comical redoubt from the disturbance to come. Like a more deviant Charles Portis, Metcalf is at his subversive best as a furious crank who, staring into a prism, stumbles over a whole new version of events, exposing historical pieties as monstrous shams.
The more pressing enigma unfolds with the physical abuse by his father, who daily whips the narrator (“an unwanted child”) with strands of copper wire.
Ben Metcalf claims “the author’s life will admit of no kinship with the narrator.” But the senior Metcalf, Frank, was evidently a real person who published an academic article in 1972 on J.D. Salinger, which the narrator son has great fun demolishing. Frank, who dies of cancer, becomes a “word-bound shade … an effigy I stuff and sew, so that I might whack at him with the sticks of my sentences.”
Of course, the grand ironies are that “Against the Country” is a fractured portrait of teen impudence rivaling Salinger’s, and the book also extends the premise of his late father’s failed novel concerning “Thomas Jefferson and his vainglorious self.”
Out of all this agony, Metcalf’s sentences flare into polished convolutions with parenthetical ((and sometimes double-parenthetical)) interruptions. There is considerable showing off, which he freely acknowledges as tedious: “Enough with this ‘wordy imitation’ of my past.” He knocks the reader off balance with an uncommon observance (his mother’s ankle is “a pretty bone, as these things go”) or homespun mystification (“The moon fat and jaundiced over Richmond, and the sky gone a gulp past grape soda”).
In his supremely humane “Why Distant Objects Please,” William Hazlitt writes, “The most painful (incidents), broken and softened by time, soothe.” Preparing to exit Goochland, Ben Metcalf offers no such unguent or healing creams. He teases with ominous remarks about “the tragedy to come” and makes a sly allusion to his future “personal dependence on pills.”
This time around, there will be no harmonious chord, only the rude and bracing clang of “Against the Country” — “Better to hate at the end of a book, I say, than to love.”
About the Author
