Probing the South’s sense of self

POETS’ novels tend to be finely wrought, pretty failures -- or worse.

Ron Rash, a justly admired poet, is an exhilarating exception, and his third book-length work of fiction, “The World Made Straight,” marks him as a major Southern writer.

His South, however, is not a place of gothic antebellum nostalgia, nor of shabby gentility among the Spanish moss-draped ruins. Rash’s family has lived in the Carolina hill country since the 1700s, and he holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.

Don’t let that deter you: Rash is too fine and knowing a writer to allow even a hint of folkloric sentimentality to intrude. His fiction inhabits a territory of great beauty and few material consolations, even today. The sound in his characters’ ears is the buzz of beer or grass, not the music of the mountain dulcimer.

In his first novel, “One Foot in Eden,” he subtly altered the crime novel’s conventions into an evocation of hardscrabble agrarian desperation. His award-winning “Saints at the River” moves from the image of a drowned child to an active meditation on progress and loss. “The World Made Straight” is his most ambitious novel, taking as its theme the interplay of place and history, and the wounding quality of memory. In the author’s plot, those things have an almost-but-not-quite deterministic quality. That qualification, along with Rash’s skill as a storyteller, allows this novel to succeed as an intellectually satisfying work of suspense.

His two previous books were set in South Carolina, while the action in “The World Made Straight” shifts slightly north, to western North Carolina. Young Travis Shelton is a high school dropout and failed grocery store bag boy, working for his farmer father and scraping together enough money by foraging to run his battered pickup truck. A fishing trip up a nearby creek slyly evokes Nick Adams’ classic trek in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” But instead of spiritual solace, Travis stumbles on somebody else’s marijuana patch, which he begins raiding and selling to Leonard Shuler, a drug dealer who lives alone in an isolated trailer.

Leonard is a former schoolteacher who lost his credential -- and his wife and daughter -- after being framed for a crime by a vindictive student. After a run-in with the shrewd and terrifying marijuana growers Carlton Toomey and his son, Travis almost loses a foot and is thrown out by his father. He goes to live with Leonard and a teenage pillhead named Deena. The three find a kind of redemption in one another in a narrative that builds toward a harrowing final confrontation with the Toomeys.

In the meantime, Leonard initiates Travis into his personal obsession, the study of original ledgers and journals through which he is trying to come to grips with a local tragedy, a Civil War atrocity called the Shelton Laurel Massacre, in which forces loyal to the Confederacy killed their neighbors who were Union sympathizers. One of Leonard’s ancestors was a doctor forced to join the rebel side -- excerpts from his ledgers form a kind of chorus throughout the book; members of Travis’ family were among the murdered.

As they sit drinking beer, the high school dropout, who is wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag, disparages the former teacher’s books, and the older man accuses him of ignorance, triggering this exchange:

“ ‘What reason you got to say I’m ignorant?’

“ ‘That tee-shirt you’re wearing, for one thing. If you’d worn it up here in the 1860s it could have gotten you killed, and by your own blood kin.’

“Travis had drunk only half his beer but Leonard’s words were as hard to grasp as wisps of ground fog.

“ ‘You trying to say my family was Yankees?’

“ ‘No, at least not in the geographic sense. They just didn’t see any reason to side with the slaves.’

“ ‘So they weren’t on either side?’

“ ‘They had a side. Nobody had the luxury of staying out of it up here. Most places they’d fight a battle and move on, but once war came it didn’t leave Madison County.’ ”

Place, both physical and historical, is a palpable presence in Rash’s work. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his agreement with Eudora Welty’s assertion, “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.”

As Rash told an interviewer, “One of the most interesting aspects of literature is how the most intensely regional literature is often the most universal. The best regional writers are like farmers drilling for water; if they bore deep and true enough into that particular place ... they tap into universal correspondences, what Jung called the collective unconscious. Thus Faulkner’s Mississippi, Munro’s Ontario, and Marquez’s Colombia are both exotic and familiar.”

In “The World Made Straight,” Rash tackles this explicitly: “Leonard raised the cup to his mouth and sipped.... Enough leaves had fallen to see the Smokies, their dark peaks jagging into the blue sky. Crisp weather always made the mountains appear more defined, as if created with scissors and construction paper. Landscape as destiny. Leonard had carried that phrase in his head for years, though he could not remember the context or where it came from. But he knew what it meant here, the sense of being closed in, of human limitation. So different from the Midwest, where the possible sprawled bright and endless in every direction. He wondered if people in the Himalayas and Andes were affected similarly. Did they live in the passive voice, as if their lives were not really happening, but instead were memories, fixed and immutable?”

There’s an interesting study to be done on the similarities between 20th century writers from the American South and the writers that emerged in Germany after World War II, particularly Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Peter Weiss, Christa Wolf and W.G. Sebald. In both groups, writing occurs in the shadow of catastrophic defeat. History is both a gaping wound and a social chasm. More difficult still, if it is to be honestly dealt with as either of those things, there must be at least a tacit contrition. The sequence of events that brought both Germany and the pre-Civil War Southern culture to spiritual and material ruin was a kind of collective betrayal of both people’s highest ideals and better natures. War and disaster followed a decision by the majority in both societies to defend an idea that was willfully and wickedly wrong.

“The World Made Straight” reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of such experience. It is less the literature of a post-apocalyptic landscape than it is one in which life, searching for reconciliation, continuously recapitulates the apocalypse in ways both social and personal. The necessary but heartbreaking end to Rash’s novel suggests that while the intellect never can be wholly reconciled with history’s facts, hearts can be -- if only ambiguously so.

As a character in one of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s great plays puts it: “Our reason only illuminates the world dimly.”