3 Cheers for Local Literature

This year, the muses of literature by North Carolina authors served up a feast of nectar and ambrosia, which—were I not speaking metaphorically—would make for some sticky reading.

First up on the banquet table was Lee Smith’s Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016, 202 pages, $24.95). In a series of essays, Smith conducts a tour of her past, highlighting those episodes that brought her from a girl in the isolated town of Grundy in Southwest Virginia to a novelist of national prominence.

In Grundy, Smith’s father owned the Five and Ten Cent Variety Store. Here Smith grew up helping her father in the store, work that afforded her many opportunities to observe the vagaries of human nature. From an upstairs window in her father’s office, Smith spent hours watching the customers and employees on the floor below. “I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator, who sees and records everything, yet is never visible. It was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.”

One magical moment in this memoir occurs when Smith, by then enrolled in Hollins College, attends a lecture by Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize winner who set her stories in the American South. Smith, who had never heard of Welty, intended to cut the lecture until her professor, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., convinced her to go.

That lecture forever changed Smith’s life as a writer. Though the lesson would take a while to sink in, Smith realized she could write about what she knew: Grundy, the mountains, the old men who hung out on the benches downtown, the women who baked marble cakes for church socials, the hardscrabble people who farmed the surrounding hills and hollers. From that point on, Smith turned her imagination toward her own backyard.

In That Bright Land (Turner Publishing Company, 2016, 322 pages, $17.95), Terry Roberts, a Western North Carolina native living in Asheville, also writes with a personal knowledge of his subject: the unrest and violence in Madison County both during and after the Civil War. As in many counties of Western North Carolina, Madison’s native sons, including several of Robert’s relatives, had enlisted in both the Confederate and Union armies. This split of loyalties led to hard feelings, atrocities, and guerrilla warfare.

That Bright Land tells the story of Jacob Ballard, formerly a spy in the Union Army, who is dispatched to Madison County to investigate a series of murders of former Union soldiers. Ballard, who grew up in Madison until his father died, uses as his cover the post of a claims investigator for disabled Union soldiers, a position allowing him the freedom to roam the mountains and ask questions without arousing suspicions. During these travels he encounters historic figures such as Zeb Vance and James Patton as well as places like the Warm Springs Hotel, with its 300 rooms and a dining room seating 600. In addition to tracking down the murderer, Ballard eventually falls in love with Sarah, the woman who helps mend the places broken in him by the war.

One quibble with this otherwise extraordinary book: At the end of part one, chapter eight, Ballard lies wounded in a Union hospital. One night a man named Walter—it’s clearly Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse during the war—wordlessly slips a hand beneath the sheets and brings Ballard to orgasm. This scene, two paragraphs in length, had nothing to do with the story, though it did leaving me wondering whether Uncle Walt was really prowling the hospital wards and arousing wounded soldiers.

Ron Rash’s The Risen (HarperCollins Publishers, 2016, 253 pages, $25.99) tells the story of two brothers dominated by a sadistic grandfather, a physician who wants his grandsons to follow him into medicine. It’s the summer of 1969 in Sylva when young Eugene and Bill Matney meet a free spirit who goes by the name of Ligeia. She entrances the young men, though eventually Bill, the older and more practical brother, realizes Ligeia is manipulating them toward her own ends. Later that fall, Ligeia vanishes from their lives, disappearing as mysteriously as she appeared.

Or has she vanished? Forty years later, we discover that Bill, a prominent surgeon, and Eugene, a failed writer and a drunk, have secrets regarding Ligeia and their private “summer of love.” Whatever the circumstances of her disappearance, the events of that summer and its terrible aftermath thrust Ligeia back into their lives. Between them, the brothers must hammer out the events of that long-ago time to arrive at the truth of what happened not only to Ligeia, but also to them.

The Risen is about choices and what those decisions do to us. “You make choices in life,” the grandfather frequently tells Bill and Eugene, “and you must accept the consequences of those choices.” Though Eugene is the narrator of this tale, it is Bill who fascinates us, Bill who knows the truth about Ligeia’s fate and who acts on that truth and guilt by becoming a better man, beloved by his wife, his children, and his patients.

Three fine books, all of them set in the highlands and all appearing within months of one another, stand as further testament to the vitality of Appalachian literature. The authors—Lee Smith, Terry Roberts, and Ron Rash—have, as some folks around here still say, “done us proud.”