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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
photograph by terry Kennedy
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argument with Guy, Eva feels that “[e]verything they said distorted itself and hid inside some other meaning” (92). In a more direct experience of language’s opacity, when speaking with H’nghai, Eva must overtly engage in the slippery negotiation of meanings. When the sixteen-year-old is told by a doctor that she is pregnant, H’nghai responds, “‘No, baby.’ . . . The doctor looked at Eva. Now what? their exchanged glances seemed to say. Did H’nghai mean she didn’t believe them or that she wanted an abortion? . . . Surely an interpreter could explain. [The director of Christian Relocation Services] should be able to provide one. Maybe she could supply one. ‘We’re none of us fluent,’ she had said” (226–27).
Further developing her assertion that words and their meanings are not stably related, Zacharias illustrates the role that printed text can play in disrupting “reality.” When Eva receives a letter from an anonymous community member containing only the words, “Go home Motherfuckers” (255), she must perform some mental acrobatics to interpret the message. She finally decides it is a clumsy attempt to support Guy against the Montagnard “foreigners,” pitting them as an outside threat to the well-being of “real” Americans, a disturbing sign of prejudices based on shallow assumptions. The strange logic of the letter emphasizes the disorientation that can result when text runs up against one’s reality: Eva stared at the piece of paper, not sure she could trust what she read. For years she had believed herself to suffer a mild dyslexia, if that was the term for her tendency not to transpose individual letters but to mix up entire words. And
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once she misread she found it almost impossible to reread correctly, for instead of scrambling words into senseless letters, her faulty reading sent her on with the wrong antecedents, left her to solve crosswords armed with false clues, permitted her to digest hallucination as irrefutable fact. (254)
A strong sense of irony is generated by the fact that while Guy once worked for the Random Herald, the local newspaper portrays him harshly in its reports on the case. One key news story about the incident transposes the numbers of Guy’s blood alcohol report, from .02 to .20, alerting Eva and Guy to the discrepancy in the police records from that night. They assume reasonably that until they can find printed proof of the original report, the story’s “facts” will be perceived as truth for the public regarding Guy’s guilt. These illustrations of words’ potential for betrayal contribute to the novel’s portrayal of a world where ordering and planning cannot ultimately save us from tragedy. In addition to the novel’s compelling assertion of an indifferent and “random” universe and its often disturbing effects, Zacharias weaves into it the story, a
PHOTOGRAPH BY Mathew WaEhner; courtesy of NC office of archives and history
Mystery Writers Receive NC Literary Awards Durham native and graduate of Davidson College, John Hart received the 2013 North Carolina Award for Literature. Hart is the author of four books, including King of Lies (2006), Down River (2007), and The Last Child (2009), which were reviewed in NCLR 2009, and Iron House (2011), which was reviewed in NCLR Online 2012. Hart has also received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award in 2009 and is a two-time recipient (in 2008 and 2010) of the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
above John Hart at the ceremony for the North Carolina Awards,
Durham, 21 Nov. 2013