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A review by christygoldsmith
The World Made Straight by Ron Rash
4.0
The World Made Straight is a bildungsroman, but one that takes place with a backdrop of beautiful mountains and stark rural poverty. For those reasons, it's a different kind of coming-of-age tale, and it's a different kind of backwoods noir.
In the hellscape of 2020, I've gotten very into backwoods noir, and Rash is, without a doubt, the most poetic of the noir writers I've read thus far. He somehow taps into the spirits of past traumas that seem to live in the mountains. Standing on a Civil War battlefield, Leonard simply states, "You know a place is haunted when it feels more real than you are." And yeah. That's what this book feels like. The place is haunted because smart folks like Leonard live in a trailer and sell drugs to survive, all while reading and thinking and studying like scholars. The place is haunted because Travis is thoughtful and curious but grows up on an old tobacco farm with an abusive father (and a complicit mother) and can never quite escape it.
In short, this book could've been set in any rural Missouri town, so it felt familiar and sad, but also somehow hopeful. It's the pinnacle of the genre for me. I give it a rating of 4.5 stars only because the historical elements were disjointed and distracting at first, but when they started to make sense. they became my favorite parts of the narrative.
In the hellscape of 2020, I've gotten very into backwoods noir, and Rash is, without a doubt, the most poetic of the noir writers I've read thus far. He somehow taps into the spirits of past traumas that seem to live in the mountains. Standing on a Civil War battlefield, Leonard simply states, "You know a place is haunted when it feels more real than you are." And yeah. That's what this book feels like. The place is haunted because smart folks like Leonard live in a trailer and sell drugs to survive, all while reading and thinking and studying like scholars. The place is haunted because Travis is thoughtful and curious but grows up on an old tobacco farm with an abusive father (and a complicit mother) and can never quite escape it.
In short, this book could've been set in any rural Missouri town, so it felt familiar and sad, but also somehow hopeful. It's the pinnacle of the genre for me. I give it a rating of 4.5 stars only because the historical elements were disjointed and distracting at first, but when they started to make sense. they became my favorite parts of the narrative.