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2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINDING JOY IN THE DARKNESS a review by Leah Hampton David Joy. Where All Light Tends to Go: A Novel. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015.
LEAH HAMPTON lives in and writes about rural Appalachia. She chairs the Developmental Studies Department at A-B Tech Community College in Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared in such venues as Appalachian Heritage, McSweeney’s, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. Read her Doris Betts Fiction Prize–winning short story “The Saint” in NCLR 2013. DAVID JOY earned his MA in Professional Writing from Western Carolina University. His first book, a memoir, is Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey (Bright Mountain Books, 2011). His second novel, The Weight Of This World, is forthcoming from Putnam in 2017. He lives in Webster, NC. STEPHANIE WHITLOCK DICKEN served as NCLR’s Art Director from 2002 to 2008, and has designed for NCLR since 2001. For this issue, she designed this review and the review of the Payne memoir.
Few visitors ever venture beyond the trails and tourist traps of Jackson County, NC, despite its beauty and uniqueness. Even fewer writers frequent its lush backwoods or attempt to capture in words any of its infuriating dichotomies. Here, in one of the most majestic counties in Appalachia, nouveau riche excess mixes with deeply entrenched poverty, and progressive counterculture clashes with traditional values. Stories happen in these mountains, stories that most people ignore or never find. With his first novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, author David Joy peers into the deepest recesses of Jackson County, and he accomplishes something other writers cannot. Using his intimate knowledge of the setting, Joy brings readers to a place they would likely otherwise never see and tells a haunting, brilliantly crafted story of addiction, abuse, and, ultimately, hope. The novel centers on the downward trajectory of Jacob McNeely, the teenage son of a local drug kingpin, a petty and wily tyrant in the affluent hamlet of Cashiers. Jacob’s father runs an auto shop, the money-laundering front for his meth deals. Though it is considered a tony address by outsiders and summer residents, Jacob and his father toil in the thick muck on the darker edges of the town. Where there’s muck there’s brass, and Jacob’s father profits handsomely. “Methamphetamine was a living, breathing body in Appalachia,” Jacob tells us in his earnest narrative voice. “The dope came from Mexico, but Daddy was the heart of the body here, pumping the blood through every vein in the region” (18). The heart of Jacob’s father is a dark one, while his son’s searches for light and a way out
of familial tragedy. Jacob’s only sources of light are Maggie, his first love, and the landscape of his home. The novel is essentially a bildungsroman, and as Jacob’s responsibilities to his father’s organization grow heavier and more adult in nature, he is pulled toward Maggie, despite the barriers to their being together, and to the woods of his childhood. Joy’s imagery for Jacob’s landscape and affection for Maggie contrasts sharply with the darker details of the story. Early in the novel, Jacob and Maggie meet in the forest to rekindle their romance. Jacob’s worries soften as he describes how “in that moment that passed between us, there was this energy in the air that seemed to cup the two of us like lightning bugs in closed hands. . . . It was an old feeling that I had all but forgotten, a feeling that I never knew I’d missed until right then” (72). The young lovers continue to meet, and Jacob’s aspirations for Maggie serve to raise his own hopes of escaping his father. These rare moments of sweetness provide welcome relief for Jacob, who soon gets dragged into the brutal killing of one of his father’s associates. After witnessing a horrific scene, Jacob must then finish the deed by disposing of the body on a remote cliff side. The assassination is not a tidy one, however, and Jacob’s circumstances quickly deteriorate. There is more killing to come, and Jacob grows angrier and more fearful of his father. The novel’s most violent, disturbing scenes of Jacob doing his father’s dirty work are also some of the most memorable in contemporary North Carolina literary fiction. Jacob suffers a waking nightmare, replaying his