Fiction
Fall Line
Joe Samuel Starnes
NewSouth Books; $24.95; 256 pages
Lake Sinclair. Lake Burton. Lake Lanier. Although it might seem like it, they haven’t always been here. They’re all man-made lakes created when dams aimed at providing electricity for the state were built throughout Georgia.
If you look up their history, you won’t find much mention of the people who moved away from the land that ended up underwater. A few sentences, at best, about whose home or farm, schoolroom or church or neighborhood lies hundreds of feet below the surface.
Nor will anything be said about questionable deals that secured the thousands of acres beneath those lakes. Certainly nothing about dirty politics, a land grab, or a back-room card game to divvy up the surrounding lake-front lots.
For that kind of story, you’ll have to pick up a copy of Joe Samuel Starnes' quiet dazzler of a new novel, “Fall Line.” Inspired by research the author did on Georgia’s man-made lakes, it’s set in fictional Achena County and takes place during a single day in 1955.
As the book opens, it’s December 1, just hours before the floodgates are set to close on the Oogasula River dam, leaving the small town of Finley Shoals and its surrounding woodlands at the bottom of newly created Lake Terrell.
Though thousands of people are expected to attend the afternoon’s gala ribbon-cutting ceremony, none of them still live here. The locals have long since cashed their relocation checks and moved to neighboring Lymanville.
Not much is left of their once-thriving farm community. But just in case, Georgia Power, the company that owns the lake, has ordered temporary employee Elmer Blizzard, the town’s ex-deputy, “to make a final inspection of the area for anything of value they can sell before it ends up on the bottom of the lake.” His search, and what he finds there, eventually compose a love letter to every rural hamlet that has disappeared when the good of the many outweighed the good of the few.
Elmer, a dog named Percy, and the elderly Mrs. McNulty, still clinging to her life-long home, share the storytelling in a novel that moves as sinuously as the Oogasula itself. In passages like this one, where the shy old dog scours the riverbank for breakfast, it sometimes comes to a complete standstill that mirrors the end of the world it describes:
“His black eyes are steady and see the earth up close in the bridge between light and darkness enshrouded in a cool mist from the Oogasula. Drops of dew sparkle on the evergreens and silvery and bluish reflections dance on the clear water gurgling on the banks and streaming in the middle.”
Elmer, by contrast, can’t stay still for long. Tetchy, twitchy and brimming with vengeance, he spits, smokes and sulks his way through the book, outraged by everything and everyone involved with the new dam.
That includes his uncle, the well-meaning but corrupt sheriff; the pulpwood truck drivers still clearing the area; the Coca Cola reps who ask for directions to the ceremony; and most of all, his sworn enemy, Aubrey Terrell, the good ole state senator who bought up Elmer’s family farm years ago, the better to resell it to Georgia Power for the lake that will bear his name.
Like its three eyewitnesses, “Fall Line” reveals much of its feelings less by what’s said than by what isn’t, the way Elmer notes “most country folks out this way” do. The only time they open up, he says, is “right before they died, letting loose for once, a last reminiscing before going on to meet their maker.”
Which is exactly what happens here. Though Elmer has never been “the talking kind and knew he could never speak the words he wanted to say,” events force him to near explosive levels, and he wanders his old haunts, brooding over the things that mattered to him—and moving ever closer to getting rid of the ones that don’t.
Starnes packs a lot of beauty, grief and violence into this brief time frame, balancing the introspective narrative with Elmer’s choking rage, his urgent and unexpectedly tender efforts to coax Mrs. McNulty to leave her childhood home, a sizzling affair between a redheaded majorette and the lecherous senator, and a chilling back-room poker game that reveals exactly whose future the glad-handing power-brokers have in mind.
But it’s in Elmer’s restless survey of everything left behind—rusted junk cars, ruined churches and wrecks of houses and businesses, birdsong and “the slimy delicious meat” of boiled peanuts, his own and Mrs. McNulty’s memories of the past—that you’ll find the soul of “Fall Line,” in that intangible richness of a place where people were “hopeful even after hundreds of years of nothing.”
Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O’Connor, Starnes’ tale may be one of the few that deserves them. The unsentimental but glorious world seen through the eyes of a “half mutt half chow” fearful of man and guns is pure Faulkner. Elmer, condemning the bigwigs around him for “their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass,” echoes the righteous, scathing hatred of Hazel Motes (“Wise Blood”).
And like the best chroniclers of Appalachia—think Larry Brown, Charles Frazier and Ron Rash—Starnes pays tribute to the stragglers of this disappearing world, those helpless with love for it and helpless to save it.
Joe Samuel Starnes was born in Anniston, Ala. and grew up in Cedartown, Ga. He attended the University of Georgia and Rutgers, and now lives in New Jersey.
About the Author
