The Lives of Others: David Joy’s When These Mountains Burn

Writer David Joy once said, “Good fiction allows the reader to step inside the body of another and view the world from a different perspective for a while. That’s the foundation for empathy, I think, the ability to view the world from the perspective of the other.

“Things open up when we can see the world like that. That said, that’s a very ambitious goal for one’s own work. I don’t think I can say that about my novels … I just write the stories I feel compelled to tell.”

Joy is either overly modest or he is unaware he possesses the power and the magic that invites his readers to slip out of themselves and “to step inside the body of another.”

In When These Mountains Burn, Joy’s novel about the opioid crisis and the changing culture of Western North Carolina, we walk in the shoes of several characters who “view the world from a different perspective.” Denny Rattler, a petty thief and drug addict who rarely makes plans beyond his next fix, shows us the desperation and despair faced every day by so many addicts. Straight-talking Deputy Sheriff Leah Green introduces us to the battlefield between law enforcement and dealers, that daily war against the pills that yearly take tens of thousands of American lives. DEA agent “Rod” Rodriguez demonstrates the perils of life undercover as he seeks to bring down the kingpins of a major drug operation in Cherokee.

But it is the central character, Raymond Mathis, whom Joy explores most deeply in When These Mountains Burn. Mathis is a retired forester with deep roots in these mountains. A widower who after three years still spends each day wishing his wife was alive, and father of a son, Ricky, an addict and a thief who even stole pills from his mother on her deathbed, Mathis feels as if the people and things he cherishes, all the old values and ways of his childhood and youth, are slipping away from him, transformed before his eyes into something dark, ugly, and unrecognizable. 

Through Mathis we learn the pain of being the parent of an addict, the desire to help a grown child when he becomes desperate for money, as Ricky does, even while recognizing deep down that love and assistance will likely prove to no avail. Through Ray’s memories of his beloved wife, Doris, we feel the weight of grief that smashes into us when someone we truly love slips away into the grave. And through his eyes we see the slow expiration of an Appalachian culture he had once revered, victim not only to the flood of opioids and other drugs but also to the storm of change wrought by builders, newcomers, and more and more law and government. 

“Used to be we took care of our own up here,” Raymond says at one point to Leah. “Used to be when something needed done we took care of it ourselves. Then we let folks from the outside come in and tell us how we ought to run things, and I want you to look around at where it’s got us.”

These changes are underscored by the invasion of coyotes into the mountains and by the devastating fires that in 2016 burned 90,000 acres in the region, 60,000 of them in North Carolina. Some of the action of When These Mountains Burn — the police operations, the flight of Denny Rattler from the drug overlords, the decision by Raymond Mathis to declare war on certain drug dealers — take place in the swirling yellow smoke of these flames, and the wailing of the coyotes often seems the dirge of mourners grieving the death of an era. Here Raymond listens to this shrill funereal music: 

“The calls quickened into a high-pitched symphony, an eerie and beautiful wave of dissonance as if God were running his hands over a theremin. Raymond closed his eyes and let the sound come through him, bury itself someplace deep that for a long time nothing else had been able to touch. All of a sudden the great conductor flattened his hands and the woods fell silent. Ray waited and listened, but as quickly as it had come it had vanished, and that was the way of the world.”

In addition to putting us into the skin of his characters, Joy also displays great intimacy with the mountains and their people. His family settled here in the 1700s, and he’s lived in North Carolina his entire life. His knowledge of customs and his insights into people of all different backgrounds, even his minor characters, make his story ring true. His familiarity with the terrain, the highways, the towns, and the shops and restaurants of this place, “his little stamp of native soil,” as William Faulkner once remarked in regard to his own writing: these details add heft and veracity to a fine story.

Finally, the beauty of many passages in When These Mountains Burn should appeal to readers who relish fine writing. “When the end finally came, it would be Raymond, his wife, and his son gathered together under that locust at the back of his family plot forever and ever, but for now the remembering was as close as he could come. Life was for the living and death was for the dead, and there was enough beauty and grace in both to mend the most tender and broken.”

A lifted glass and a hearty toast to a fine novel.