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A review by juliechristinejohnson
Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories by Ron Rash
5.0
“Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
In Something Rich and Strange, a collection of thirty-two previously published and two new short stories, Ron Rash demonstrates this sixth sense, this sense of place, to shiveringly acute degree. His place is the mountains and valleys of southwestern North Carolina, the heart of Appalachia.
Rash's stories span generations, from the Civil War through the Depression, the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq. Each story is sloped and slanted and ridged by the land, dense with fog, wet with rain, seeping with humidity. Caution must be taken when entering the sheltering cool of the North Carolina woods, where menacing creatures lurk: snakes and bears and men with shotguns; just as caution must be taken when entering a Rash story: sorrow, violence and madness wait in the shadows.
In this Appalachian Garden of Eden, good battles with evil. A pawn-shop owner finds his brother and sister-in-law huddled beneath blankets in an unheated trailer in “Back of Beyond.” Their son and his meth-addicted friends have taken over their farmhouse, selling off bits and pieces of the parents’ lives to support their habit. In “Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven”Jody and Lauren have planned their escape from their childhood home for years: college, jobs, marriage will save them. But Jody, home from his first year of university, finds Lauren has succumbed to the siren song of meth. Can he save her? An arsonist in “Burning Bright” is a thoughtful and considerate lover, offering a widow in her sixties a chance at new love. In the collection's opening story, “Hard Times,” hunger during the Depression is outsized by a man’s pride and compassion has an expiration date.
Madness lingers, driving characters to moments of inexplicable violence, as in “Night Hawks,” where a former sixth-grade teacher finds shelter in the midnight to six a.m. shift at the radio station. “Into the Gorge,” old-timer Jesse, out harvesting ginseng on federal land—land that used to belong to his family—encounters a forest ranger and in a heartbeat, things take a disastrous turn.
Women are often vulnerable in Rash's wild mountains, but the Confederate soldier in “Lincolnites” is no match against a knitting needle, and a runaway trusty doesn’t get very far once he meets a young, angelic farmwife in “The Trusty.”
Yes, it’s true. There are few moments of redemption in Something Rich and Strange. In “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” one of the most tender of the collection, a vet and a farmer, both in their eighties, help a cow birth a breached calf. It is a poignant moment in a long-standing friendship, recalling the deep bonds author Kent Haruf—another who wrote with such a profound sense of place—created between his characters. But this tenderness is rare. If you’ve read any Ron Rash, you have some idea of what to expect. His eye is unflinching, he bores down to his characters’ tender cores and splits them open, exposing pink flesh and pumping blood or putrid decay to the warm, humid, North Carolina night.
Rash’s writing is marvelous and his mastery of the short story breathtaking. He wrings full stories with astonishing economy of plot—many are mere pages long—yet each is rendered in vivid detail. You have the sense that you are eavesdropping into these lives, seeing, hearing, smelling Rash’s world before the characters walk away, leaving you wondering what might become of their Shakespearean-tragic lives.
― Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
In Something Rich and Strange, a collection of thirty-two previously published and two new short stories, Ron Rash demonstrates this sixth sense, this sense of place, to shiveringly acute degree. His place is the mountains and valleys of southwestern North Carolina, the heart of Appalachia.
Rash's stories span generations, from the Civil War through the Depression, the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq. Each story is sloped and slanted and ridged by the land, dense with fog, wet with rain, seeping with humidity. Caution must be taken when entering the sheltering cool of the North Carolina woods, where menacing creatures lurk: snakes and bears and men with shotguns; just as caution must be taken when entering a Rash story: sorrow, violence and madness wait in the shadows.
In this Appalachian Garden of Eden, good battles with evil. A pawn-shop owner finds his brother and sister-in-law huddled beneath blankets in an unheated trailer in “Back of Beyond.” Their son and his meth-addicted friends have taken over their farmhouse, selling off bits and pieces of the parents’ lives to support their habit. In “Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven”Jody and Lauren have planned their escape from their childhood home for years: college, jobs, marriage will save them. But Jody, home from his first year of university, finds Lauren has succumbed to the siren song of meth. Can he save her? An arsonist in “Burning Bright” is a thoughtful and considerate lover, offering a widow in her sixties a chance at new love. In the collection's opening story, “Hard Times,” hunger during the Depression is outsized by a man’s pride and compassion has an expiration date.
Madness lingers, driving characters to moments of inexplicable violence, as in “Night Hawks,” where a former sixth-grade teacher finds shelter in the midnight to six a.m. shift at the radio station. “Into the Gorge,” old-timer Jesse, out harvesting ginseng on federal land—land that used to belong to his family—encounters a forest ranger and in a heartbeat, things take a disastrous turn.
Women are often vulnerable in Rash's wild mountains, but the Confederate soldier in “Lincolnites” is no match against a knitting needle, and a runaway trusty doesn’t get very far once he meets a young, angelic farmwife in “The Trusty.”
Yes, it’s true. There are few moments of redemption in Something Rich and Strange. In “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” one of the most tender of the collection, a vet and a farmer, both in their eighties, help a cow birth a breached calf. It is a poignant moment in a long-standing friendship, recalling the deep bonds author Kent Haruf—another who wrote with such a profound sense of place—created between his characters. But this tenderness is rare. If you’ve read any Ron Rash, you have some idea of what to expect. His eye is unflinching, he bores down to his characters’ tender cores and splits them open, exposing pink flesh and pumping blood or putrid decay to the warm, humid, North Carolina night.
Rash’s writing is marvelous and his mastery of the short story breathtaking. He wrings full stories with astonishing economy of plot—many are mere pages long—yet each is rendered in vivid detail. You have the sense that you are eavesdropping into these lives, seeing, hearing, smelling Rash’s world before the characters walk away, leaving you wondering what might become of their Shakespearean-tragic lives.