Hard Times and Tough People

In Over the Plain Houses, Atlanta writer Julia Franks gives us a powerful story of a disintegrating marriage, social change, and religious struggles, all set in Southern Appalachia.

The year is 1939. Irenie Lambey, a mother and wife born and raised in the mountains of Western North Carolina, has grown increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage and with her life. She questions the decisions made by husband Brodis, a crippled logger turned fundamentalist preacher who despises the changes that have come to the mountains and who rules his household like an Old Testament patriarch. Irenie also feels beaten down by the rough work and poverty of farming, and wonders whether she might not live a fuller life away from this hardscrabble existence. She feels “owned” by her husband and restricted by her past. 

Enter Virginia Furman, a USDA agent sent along with her own husband to Irenie’s mountains to foster modernization among the farmers and their families. Even before she meets Irenie, Virginia has heard of Matthew, the Lambeys’ academically talented son, and she encourages Irenie to send the boy to a school in Asheville, where he can more fully realize his gifts. Eventually the two women become confidants, and it is Virginia who assists Irenie when she makes the attempt to escape her husband and the farm.

Though we readers are clearly meant to sympathize with Irenie Lambey and her new friend, Virginia, the character of Brodis Lambey dominates the pages of Over the Plain Houses just as he strives to dominate his wife. Having experienced a religious conversion when he survived a logging accident, and having later felt the call to preach the Gospel, Brodis wrestles with God and with modernity throughout the novel. As he tries to pick his way through a thicket of complexities—his attempts to understand Irenie, his desires for his son, his skepticism about the government’s intrusions into mountain ways—Brodis seeks guidance from scripture. In another author’s hands, such struggles over interpretation and understanding would likely have become a caricature, but Franks gives us a full, vivid portrait of a man caught between two different eras and two ways of looking at the eternal questions.

The tension between Brodis and his wife ratchets up when Brodis discovers Irenie slipping out of their bed to walk at night in the hills. Though Irenie uses these excursions to escape her husband and find solitude, Brodis suspects her first of having an affair with another man and then of practicing witchcraft. Franks masterfully records for us the preacher’s shifting perceptions and his efforts to discover what is driving his wife to such strange behavior, never realizing that he himself has become her tormenter, the oppressor she seeks to escape. 

In addition to its finely drawn characters, Over The Plain Houses deserves commendation for its poetic language and descriptions. Here is a brief look at Irenie in bed with Brodis:

“It was her husband, and she was in their bed, and it was late spring. Other sounds made their way through: the low thrush of the creek branch, the insects, a vigorous scurry in the walls, who-who-who-cooks for you somewhere to the south at the tobacco fields, below the first ridge. The dawn was on its way, and something inside her had ripped open.”

That writing is pure music to the ear of any attentive reader. And this music runs throughout Over the Plain Houses.

Then there are Franks’ descriptions of mountain life. Not only does Franks give us flesh-and-blood characters, even the minor ones, but she also lets her readers see, hear, and feel the work and leisure of her mountain people. Her familiarity with local plants and wildlife, doubtless enhanced by a lifetime of hiking the Smokies, shines on every page. One small example: Her portrayal of Brodis as a teenager learning how to ride the logs down a river left me marveling at the research she must have compiled to create such a scene. Nor does she miss a beat when giving us pictures of women cooking or sewing, of men plowing and planting. Here, for instance, Brodis is plowing his field with a mule:

“Brodis swung his crippled foot around and up the new-turned furrow, and then again, and again, and it wasn’t long before sweat damped his collar and slid down his spine. He leaned on the hickory grips, and the dense grain of the wood told him of the rip of the share, and the upboil of earth, and how the soil resisted a man’s effort until it had no choice but to yield with a sigh of mud and mold and rot.”

The details in this brief passage—“the hickory grips,” “the dense grain of the wood,” “the rip of the share”—reveal an author intimately familiar with the people and place of her story.

Over the Plain Houses offers us drama and humor, accuracy in detail, characters who will stay with us long after we’ve read the last page, and a story relevant to our own time. What else could we ask for?

Highly recommended.