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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
A giant in the making: New fiction from Susan Woodring a review by Tanya Long Bennett Susan Woodring. Goliath. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012.
NCLR Editorial Board member Tanya Long Bennett is a Professor of English at North Georgia College and State University. Her publications include articles on such writers as Lee Smith, Lorraine Lopez, and Ana Castillo. See another of her NCLR reviews in the 1998 issue. Susan Woodring has written two previous books, The Traveling Disease (Main Street Rag, 2007) and Springtime on Mars: Stories (Press 53, 2008). Her short fiction has been featured in such publications as the William and Mary Review, Yemassee, and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. In 2006, she won both the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction Award and the Isotope Editor’s Prize.
“A teenage boy coming in from a morning of lighting fires along far-flung creeks was the one to find the body” (1). So begins Susan Woodring’s new novel, Goliath, set in a small and dying North Carolina town of that name in the mid–1980s. The discovery made by this teenage boy, Vincent Bailey, turns out to be the trainsmashed body of Percy Harding, third-generation owner of Goliath’s most important business, Harding Furniture Company. Although the town’s spiral toward its demise is not obvious to the residents of Goliath in the beginning of the story, Percy’s suicide is only one sign that Goliath’s prime, both economic and historical, is past. Through Rosamond Rogers, the novel’s independent and resilient protagonist, Woodring chronicles this small town’s decline from a once-thriving hive of commerce and social activity to a burned-out shell of memory. In the course of eight months, from Percy’s October death until the town parade in May, Rosamond negotiates her own grief over the loss of Percy and reconsiders allowing someone to love her as much as she once loved her husband, Hatley Rogers, before he abandoned her and their daughter ten years ago. In spite of some problems with narrative pacing and thematic development, Goliath offers a thought-provoking, and at times eloquent, exploration of humanity’s need to be loved and, even more significant, to recognize love when it is present. Woodring’s usually adept control of language and her fascination with many of the questions central to human experience suggest that Goliath will not be the last of her works to attract readers’ attention. Woodring creates in this novel a wide array of characters, all of
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whom are reeling in the aftermath of Percy Harding’s shocking suicide. Rosamond is no less impacted by Percy’s death than are his wife and his grown son, Ryan, who now takes over the family business. While it soon becomes apparent that Harding Furniture is suffering financially, ostensibly under Ryan’s management, Rosamond realizes over time that the company’s decline began before Percy died; in fact, it is likely the reason for Percy’s suicide. For Rosamond, who worked as Percy’s secretary for many years, the loss of her boss and intimate friend – perhaps even her lover – is heavy. She wanders about the town seeking some explanation, some sign of how to move forward. Beyond this grief, however, the company’s faltering, and eventually its closing, impacts the town’s very viability. Here, Woodring explores the history of many such small American towns that have folded in upon themselves once their central industry could no longer be sustained. It seems a coincidence that at the time of Percy’s death, Rosamond’s daughter, Agnes, has recently dropped out of college and come home to work in a local grocery store. Agnes has always been obsessed with maps, with tracing possible paths into unknown places, rather than with her connection to “home,” so even she does not really understand why she has come back to Goliath. Yet while she’s here, she welcomes the company of her childhood friend, Ray Winston, street preacher and groundskeeper of the local school. Like her mother, she is recovering from loss. Just as her father abandoned her and her mother ten years ago, Agnes has left James, her pseudo “husband,” named