100
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
A LITTLE BIT OF SUFFERING IN COMMON a review by Jim Coby John Hart. The Unwilling: A Novel. St. Martin’s Press, 2021. Charles Dodd White. How Fire Runs: A Novel. Swallow Press, 2020.
JIM COBY received his PhD in English with a focus on Southern literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University-Kokomo. He is a regular reviewer for NCLR and has also published an interview with Matthew Griffin in NCLR 2017. His scholarship has been published in the Ellen Glasgow Journal of Southern Women Writers, Teaching American Literature, Pennsylvania English, South Central Review, and The Explicator.
As our collective reality spins toward an ever-increasing mire of incertitude and instability, it is perhaps not without reason that thrillers have become the genre du jour for many of our most talented writers. Two new works from authors with strong ties to North Carolina exemplify this idea, as John Hart and Charles Dodd White each explore the resonances of history, race, hatred, love, and aging in their new novels. A compulsively readable work propelled by not only raceagainst-time action, but also the endearing bonds between siblings put at loose ends by war, prison, and addiction, John Hart’s The Unwilling provides a unique, if somewhat overly plotted, thriller, well-suited for our times. Although he is not as concerned with Southern histories of violence as contemporary thriller writers such as Attica Locke or Greg Iles, Hart, too, plots his work in the American South, choosing as the hub of his action Charlotte, NC, a town where “people knew your business, or thought they did, or thought they had the right” (103). When a gruesome murder shakes the city and its residents to their core, Jason becomes the primary subject in the investigation. And it becomes the mission of Gibby, his sixteenyear-old brother, to exonerate Jason by locating the actual villain and unearthing a host of secrets that the town would prefer to remain buried. While the salacious work of sleuthing comprises the bulk of Hart’s book, the first quarter of the novel revolves not around the murder, but rather with Jason’s return to his hometown
after three tours in Vietnam and a brief stint in prison. Not since Emmett Smith in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country have we seen a Vietnam veteran so troubled, yet so deeply fascinating, exist against the backdrop of a small Southern town, with all of the security and scrutiny that accompany such a life. As a gun-smuggling, drug-pushing, womanizing Vietnam veteran, Jason embodies many of the worst stereotypes of those returning from war. What separates him from these stereotypes, however, is his mental dexterity and the fact that he remains totally and completely self-aware of his actions and trespasses. And when his “crimes” are revealed later in the novel, it releases a wave of reassurances among readers knowing that they were right to be sympathetic to this character for much of this roller-coaster of a novel. Unfortunately, Jason’s presence in the novel, at least his presence beyond the confines of prison walls, is short lived. As a result, we miss out on much of what makes Jason so endearing and interesting – his interactions with the world from which he feels alienated and paranoid – and instead get to know him primarily through his engagement with those inside the prison walls, especially his bareknuckle fights with a prisoner named X. What small degree of verisimilitude is found in the first portion of the novel is thoroughly submarined by the introduction of X, an inmate at Lanesworth Prison. X quickly reveals himself to be a fierce, maniacal fighter, an amateur philosopher, and a deep and passionate admirer of Jason’s self-reliance. The senti-