Ron Rash entered the Southern literary scene in 2002 with “One Foot in Eden,” a stunning debut novel set in North Carolina, and has not faltered for a moment. There are now eight novels, seven volumes of prizewinning short stories and five books of poetry.
The novels are noteworthy not only for their excellence but also because they are that endangered species: literary fiction. Several very fine Southern writers are having big successes, but often within a crime novel framework that stretches from the cozy to the savage.
One reviewer wrote of “One Foot in Eden” that the novel was “disguised” as a murder mystery, but was not really one. This is so. Rash’s novels are theme and character driven. Usually set in the Carolinas or Tennessee, they explore issues of family, status and class, generational conflict, making these subjects universal.
In “The Caretaker,” set in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Daniel and Cora Hampton are basically good people. They own a general store and sawmill and have treated their fellow townspeople fairly, even generously. During the Depression and afterwards, they were patient about payment for groceries and provided as many jobs to as many men as possible at the mill.
They have prospered but have been unlucky in their family life. Two children, girls, died young so their boy, Jacob, is the center, the obsession of their lives. They have plans for him. But Jacob does not want to go off to college.
He wishes to stay in his hometown and then, to their horror, marries Naomi, a maid at the hotel who has come there from near Pulaski, Tennessee to work. She is a virtuous, charming, respectable, innocent girl, and the love and marriage and her pregnancy should be greeted with hosannas, but the Hamptons behave as if they were the King and Queen of Appalachia and the crown prince married a peasant.
They rant and rave. They disinherit Jacob. Then Naomi becomes pregnant and Jacob is drafted—the year is 1951—and sent to Korea. Jacob, wounded in combat, will spend considerable time undergoing surgeries and recuperating.
Meanwhile, Cora, his mother, hatches a plan—a scheme to separate Jacob forever from his wife and child—and convinces her husband to go along with it. A decent man, he is reluctant, but this Appalachian Lady MacBeth bullies and shames him: but “screw your courage to the sticking-place and we’ll not fail.”
What this boy’s mother does, in the name of what is “best” for her son, and the Hampton family line, is the kind of evil that can only be the result of righteousness, the pathological belief that one person knows what is best for others.
Of course, the plot will be, finally, revealed, but not until there is a wave of suffering, the result of provincial pride and arrogance worthy of royalty.
