Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash (review)

Abstract

can't bear the place, but they couldn't bear life without it. Stewart's characters endure limited economic opportunity, the environmental butchery and corporate corruption of the coal companies, and the social condescension ofoutsiders, all in the shadow ofthe surrounding mountains that serve as both prison and haven for them. Those who survive absorb this as an ineluctable condition, remaining on the alert for those small moments of brilliance that allow them to continue. Knowledge of this condition resonates in the resignation of the narrator's voice in the title story, when he assures us that this is "the way things always happen here" (18). Stewart's hardscrabble characters are most often tugged in opposing directions. They negotiate strategies for survival, be that by a parachute leap from the New River Gorge Bridge, carving old railroad ties into totem pole icons of the umw labor movement or turning from the political platitudes of a whistle stop speech by jfk in favor of the free whiskey being dispensed from an old ice cream truck. Some survive, some don't, which is, of course, "the way things always happen here." And Kevin Stewart sets these troubled but resilient lives before us in prose that is both supple and vigorous. A gifted new writer has arrived on the Appalachian literature scene—one with intimate knowledge of the lasting effect worked upon us by the grit ofthe ground we inhabit. Ron Rash. Chemistry and Other Stories. New York: Picador. 312 pages. Trade paperback. $13.00. REVIEWED BY RANDALL WlLHELM In an interview with Ron Rash, Joyce Compton Brown relates a particularly interesting anecdote about the young writer-to-be. As a boy, Rash would tramp the hills and streams around his parents' home in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and one evening he startled the adults by lugging home in a gunney sack, a tremendous hardshell snapping turtle "big as a thanksgiving platter." Never content with only brook trout from clear running streams, the young Rash felt compelled to investigate the undersides of submerged logs and deep murky holes in search of more rare and dangerous species. As Compton says, "Ron was never one to settle for easy surfaces." With no his newvolume ofshort fiction, ChemistryandOtherStories, Ron Rash continues to strike quickly and deftly into the mysterious depths of theAppalachian region, chroniclinghis nativewestern North Carolina with characteristic elegance and dignity. And more often than not, he hauls up the ugly and bizarre along with the beautiful and wondrous, and lays bare the pain and guilt, the failed hopes and hopeless dreams his characters desperately suffer behind tightly controlled surfaces. Readers of Rash's previous work {Eureka Mill, 1998; Among the Believers, 2000; RaisingtheDead, 2002, OneFootin Eden, 2002; Saints at the River, 2004; The World Made Straight, 2006) will encounter a familiar world in these thirteen stories, each one carefully crafted to dip deeply into the darkwaters ofthe human heart, where compassion, forgiveness, sacrifice, cruelty and self-destruction uneasily swim. Here, three old men stalk a giant fish in which no one else believes; a son tries to comprehend his depressed father's death at the bottom of a lake; a young girl falls in love with a knife-thrower from a traveling show, his silver daggers edging ever closer as the relationship builds; a worn-out basketball star with a mangled knee strives for dignity on the court where he had once dominated; a grieving mother leads a surveyor into the mountains to mark once and for all the exact spot of her son's death. Written over the last eleven years, these stories cohere into a patchwork quilt of Rash's work, each piece precisely stitched and standing on its own yet also part ofthe larger fabric ofhis storytelling, which has been developing steadily since the mid-1990s. Rash's gift for tightly spun, evocative stories crafted with razor clean imagery and ending on the cusp of resolution is on display in these thirteen tales. Whether it's a middle-aged man remembering the winter he transformed from adolescence to maturity ("The Projectionist'sWife"), a father risking everything to save his son from drug dependency ("Deep Gap"), or a former Korean War nurse...