Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
SOMETHING (MORE) RICH AND STRANGE a review by Jimmy Dean Smith Ron Rash. In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena. Doubleday, 2020. Frédérique Spill. The Radiance of Small Things in Ron Rash’s Writing. University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
JIMMY DEAN SMITH teaches English at Union College in Barbourville, KY. His articles about Ron Rash have appeared in Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash; Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies; Representing Rural Women; and NCLR. RON RASH is the Parris Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. In the Valley is his twenty-third book. He has been featured often in NCLR, including interviews in the 2004 and 2014 issues and essays about his work in 2004 and 2011. His numerous honors include, most recently, the 2020 Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature given to him by Mercer University’s Spencer B. King, Jr. Center for Southern Studies. FRÉDÉRIQUE SPILL is an Associate Professor of American literature at the University of Picardy-Jules Verne in Amiens, France. She has written extensively on William Faulkner as well as on Ron Rash. Spill co-edited The Wagon Moves: New Essays on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (Editions L’Harmattan, 2018).
In the Valley is Ron Rash’s sixth book of short stories, the first since Something Rich and Strange (2014) collected thirtyfour of his earlier works in a career-spanning retrospective. The subtitle of that volume, Selected Stories, foregrounds the act of criticism Rash himself performed in preparing the volume: he “took a backward glance at his own writings, grappling with the difficult task of choosing some and overlooking others” with a commercial eye toward “mak[ing] [the] author’s work available to a wider readership” – that is, selling short stories to people who don’t usually buy short stories (Spill 146). Rash’s acts of self-criticism also included, of course, giving a name to that selection, one that would define the ethos for the short fiction he chose to represent his work. With the new volume, Rash gives us an opportunity to play a party game, to decide which of the ten stories comprising In the Valley are, in fact, rich and strange, which, like the dematerializing body of a drowned girl in the gorgeous story that gives the selection its name, startle and instruct and mystify. For many readers of In the Valley, the big news will be the return of Serena Pemberton, the world-class villain in Rash’s best-known novel, Serena (2008). A human cancer, an invasive species in black jodhpurs, Serena has been away, preparing her assault on the forests of Brazil, for the last nine months. Now she must complete the hands-on job of deforesting Western North Carolina’s mountains. Readers will be pleased to hear that her grotesque henchman, Galloway, and his weird mother return as
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well, and that foolish or unlucky people make the mistake of getting in Serena’s way. In the novella as in the novel, Serena wreaks surgically precise havoc on her ecosystem. It is commonplace to connect Serena with Lady Macbeth, but in “In the Valley,” as in the novel, other Elizabethan characters come to mind – Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the world-beater, for instance, or, sticking with Shakespeare, the gleefully evil Richard III. When we first spot an eagle soaring above the denuded wastes that used to be timberland, we immediately look for Serena to start being horrifying. The novella has no hero to match Serena’s Horace Kephart (the novella even floats the suggestion that the real-life Kephart’s recent death was Serena’s doing). But Snipes’s motley-clad work crew assumes a more central role, shifting the perspective of the story toward the working people and the hard decisions industrial modernity has forced on them. One character compares Serena with the cruelly inhuman efficiency experts of textile mills, about whom Rash first wrote in “The Stretch-Out” in Eureka Mill (1998). Brief inter-chapters tell of the many extinctions that deforesting causes – of mammal, birds, and reptiles – an elegiac trope Rash has repeated throughout his career. For all its concessions to the clockwork rationality of industrial rapacity, however, In the Valley is rooted in rich, strange soil, where skeletons mount fog-bound hillsides, and the back road to Asheville crosses over the Styx. Many readers are familiar with Ron Rash’s enthusiasm for self-revision, as in revisiting an earlier novel for a sequel, as is