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At last, an ‘anti-Deliverance’
Ron Rash’s second novel sounded interesting even before I saw on the cover that one of my top-10 favorite authors, North Carolina’s own Lee Smith, had been captivated by it.
“A classic tale of passion and tragedy,” Smith said. “Each voice rings as true as the sound of an ax in the cold morning air. I read this book straight through. I had to.”
Rash’s novel, Saints at the River, is set just over the state line in Oconee County, South Carolina. His first novel, One Foot in Eden, also uses Oconee County as a backdrop.
“I know that county well,” Rash said. “I’ve taken the same landscape where Deliverance was set but hope I’ve shown Appalachians in a more realistic light than they’ve been portrayed elsewhere.”
During a Tuesday night reading, Rash expanded on that theme, saying that in writing Saints, which shows the “people of the river in a more complex light and also a truer light,” he has written the “anti-Deliverance.”
It’s about time.
I still remember how offended I was by James Dickey’s Deliverance, assigned reading while I was a student at Young Harris College, a junior college in Towns County, Georgia.
Though I grew up near Atlanta, I loved the north Georgia mountains on sight and quickly made friends with college classmates from nearby towns including Hayesville, Murphy and Andrews in North Carolina and Hiawassee, Blairsville and Blue Ridge in Georgia.
Dickey’s portrayal of mountain dwellers as ignorant and violent was contradictory to the friends I’d made. The book was assigned because Dickey was to be the featured speaker at one of our required convocations.
And this was before the release of Deliverance the movie that stereotyped Appalachia as a region of great scenic beauty populated by backward, vicious people.
“I think that movie did a lot of harm,” Rash said during a telephone interview. “I was conscious of Deliverance while I was writing Saints.”
It was refreshing to have Rash take on the issue in such a straightforward manner, even as he emphasized that Saints is a work of fiction.
In his new novel, published this year by Henry Holt and Co. of New York, Rash tells of the aftermath of a tragedy that occurred on a river he calls the Tamassee.
A 12-year-old girl from Minnesota, Ruth Kowalsky, has drowned, but her body is trapped in a hydraulic (defined in the book as “a place where an obstacle makes water move in a circular motion”) under the roiling waters of the whitewater river. Her parents desperately want to recover the child to give her a proper burial. Their solution is to bring in a portable dam that could divert enough water to allow divers to reach the body. To do so would require some sort of road access to the site and drilling some holes in the river’s bedrock to anchor the dam.
But the fictional Tamassee, like the real Chattooga, is classified as a federal wild and scenic river, and as such, is protected by law from such incursions.
The novel’s conflict is built around the opposing interests of Ruth’s parents and local environmentalists, who feel any breach of the law protecting the river would set a dangerous precedent.
Rash said he wanted to write a novel that centered on environmental issues without the “black-and-white” character portrayal in most such novels, where the environmental advocate is 100 percent right and the bad-guy developer is just as wrong.
“I wanted a novel with conflict within the story and within myself,” Rash said. “I believe fiction needs tension.”
To illustrate his point, Rash quoted novelist Graham Greene, who once said “The Swiss have had 400 years of peace and prosperity, and all they’ve given us is the cuckoo clock.”
Another reason I was drawn to the book is that it’s narrated by a journalist and its first scene takes place in a newsroom.
Readers are introduced to Saints’ storyteller, photographer Maggie Glenn, an Oconee County native turned big-city (Columbia, S.C.) newspaperwoman, as she imagines her quiet, computer-filled newsroom filled with the manual typewriters and bustling copyboys of 50 years ago.
The book has even more going for it than well-drawn characters, familiar scenery and a gripping plot: it has carefully crafted, evocative language. Rash’s first published writings were poems, and that heritage is evident in reading Saints.
The road from Westminster, S.C., up to Tamassee “coils upward like a black snake climbing a tree,” and seeing the dogwood trees is “like time-lapse photography in reverse. White blossoms that puddled the ground in Columbia reattach themselves to the limbs.”
Rash, who holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University, is currently at work on a third novel. In addition to Saints and One Foot in Eden, he has published two short story collections and three volumes of poetry.
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