Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
(MIS)REPRESENTATION OF THE MOUNTAIN SOUTH a review by Leah Hampton Julia Franks. Over the Plain Houses: A Novel. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2016. Philip Lewis. The Barrowfields. New York: Hogarth, 2017.
LEAH HAMPTON is a native North Carolinian and a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, where she edits Bat City Review. Previously, she taught English at multiple colleges in the Asheville area. Her reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage and The Los Angeles Times. Her awards include the 2012 Doris Betts Fiction Prize for “The Saint,” which was then published in NCLR 2013, and the Keene Prize for Literature from the University of Texas for a story, “Boomer,” which was published in NCLR Online 2018. JULIA FRANKS has lived in the Appalachian Mountains most of her life. She currently lives in Atlanta, where she is the founder of Loose Canon, an organization with online software that allows kids to choose the books they want to read. She was named Georgia Author of the Year Award for Literary Fiction in 2017. PHILIP LEWIS spent his childhood in the North Carolina mountains. He graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and Campbell University Norman Adrian School of Law. He now lives and practices law in Charlotte, NC.
North Carolina writers love our mountains, but few fully understand Appalachia’s culture and literary legacy. All too often, the mountain South is misrepresented, usually inadvertently, by writers who don’t embrace the responsibility that comes with setting a story here. Because of persistent, hurtful stereotypes about Appalachia, major publishers often forgive, and even reward, these writers, and as a result many readers consider their books to be accurate representations of the region. Mountain people have long been the subjects of stories that use our home, rather than engage with it. One recent example is Philip Lewis’s debut novel. The Barrowfields is the bildungsroman of young Henry Aster, son of an eccentric alcoholic by the same name. Young Henry is a lad of Old Buckram, NC, a mountain hamlet rife with local color. Lewis describes Old Buckram as a grim, backwards place, occupied by townsfolk with “[f]aces expressionless and impassive, appearing to live in the complete absence of curiosity” (233). Young Henry, a musical whiz kid, grows up in a creepy mansion on the outskirts of town. Inside this spooky domicile reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, the family tiptoes around their patriarch, elder Henry, whose drunkenness and taciturnity has a lasting effect on his son. The author, who grew up in Ashe County, devotes lengthy descriptive passages to the mountains and their unsavory inhabitants. Lewis has acknowledged in
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interviews that his hometown is nowhere near as dark or regressive as the fictional Old Buckram. Thus, one might assume Lewis’s portrait of Appalachia to be a faithful one, free of offensive hillbilly typecasting. Alas, the author displays considerable disdain for the place and its people. On its surface, the book examines dysfunctional family relationships and writing as an escape from same. The Barrowfields follows two generations of Henrys in quasi-gothic style. Young Henry details his father’s life story, then recounts his own coming of age as a young lawyer. Both men reject mountain life and chase lofty literary and intellectual goals which will, they hope, free them from their Appalachian prison. The deeper story, however, is Lewis’s sublimation and delegitimization of everyone but his narrator (who, it must be said, bears a striking resemblance to the author). The Asters, and nearly everyone in Old Buckram, are portrayed as a rabble of hicks. Baffled by the elder Henry’s intellect, they reject “the whole idea of his exceptional literacy” (15) and question not only his literary ambitions but learning itself. The Asters’ emblematic ignorance defies, of course, the family’s obvious folkloric traditions, not to mention the many settlement schools and educational movements common to the region at the time. It also defies Phillip Lewis’s own upbringing in a highly educated mountain family. The Asters remain implausibly anti-book even after their son’s bookishness results in his rise to fortune. Further, their criticisms are voiced in