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2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
It’s Complicated a review by Sharon E. Colley Dale Neal. The Half-Life of Home. Sacramento: Casperian Books, 2013.
Sharon E. Colley is Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia State College in Macon, GA. Her research interests include Southern and Appalachian literature. She has published on such writers as Lee Smith. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Dale Neal has published short fiction and essays in such literary magazines as Carolina Quarterly, Crescent Review, and Marlboro Review. He also writes about religion and books for the Asheville Citizen-Times. See NCLR 2003 for a sample of his writing. He has just completed and is looking for a publisher for a new novel currently titled “Appalachian Book of the Dead.”
Dale Neal’s novel The Half-Life of Home initially seems to belong to a familiar category of Appalachian texts dealing with failing family farms, invading developers and bittersweet urbanization. (Texts such as Lee Smith’s Oral History [1983] and Catherine Landis’s Harvest [2004] come to mind.) Neal’s book on changes in land ownership and usage employs an impressively complex approach. He contextualizes these concerns by suggesting that Appalachia’s land development issues are not exceptional and that the tenuous connections of humans are the true legacy of mountain life. In doing so, Neal creates a contemporary North Carolina text that successfully links the region to the larger nation. A journalist living in Asheville, NC, Neal previously won the Novello Literary Award for Cow Across America (2009). His second novel, The Half-Life of Home, centers around Royce Wilder, a land appraiser; his wife Eva, who is losing her job at a non-profit; and their teenage son, Dean, whom they recently enrolled in a private high school. Set in 1992, the book is threaded together with the family’s economic woes and Royce’s ambivalence about selling family land in nearby Beaverdam. This familiar tension is complicated by the possibility that the mountain property is contaminated by naturally occurring radon. The confirmed presence of radon could make the property
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uninhabitable for humans but ideal as a toxic waste dump, a proposition that fills Royce with understandable hesitation. This danger arises not from timbering or coal mining, however, making the threat natural rather than manmade. As a result, the novel avoids a simplistic rural-good/ development-bad dichotomy and suggests a more complex reality. The two outside investors also resist easy stereotype. The corpulent white land dealer, while he never becomes a completely trustworthy figure, physically shrinks dramatically through the novel. Significantly, the ethnically Japanese partner is not the much derided foreign investor: “Matsui, a native-born American citizen like you and me, spent his childhood behind barbed wire in the middle of nowhere. His family lost everything. His father even committed suicide” (75–76). Matsui is less a predator than a participant in the food chain. Royce’s own father was raised in lumber camps, where the narrator states that mountain men sold “their birthright” (226). In The Half-Life of Home, this connection to the land is often complicated or rivaled by relationship to others, particularly fathers. Whether it is Royce’s memories of his taciturn father or his struggles with his somewhat rebellious son, Dean, paternal relationships take center stage repeatedly. Does Royce’s loyalty lie with the land his father bequeathed or the son