Inside the Prism: Themes that Flow Throughout Ron Rash's Works

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS—REVIEW ESSAY Inside the Prism: Themes that Flow Throughout Ron Rash's Works__________ Susan M. Lefler Ron Rash. Saints at the River. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 2004. 256 pages. Hardback. $24.00. POET AND NOVELIST RON RASH holds the first Parris Distinguished Professorship in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. Although he grew up in the foothills town of Boiling Springs, N.C, his entire family on both sides have lived in the North Carolina mountains since the 18th Century, and the region is the focus for his writing. While sustaining a full-time career as a professor of English, Rash published two volumes of short stories, three volumes of poetry, and two novels within five years. His fiction won a General Electric Younger Writers award in 1987. He received an NEA Poetry Fellowship in 1994 and the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996. One Foot in Eden, published in 2002, won the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award as well as Foreword Magazine's Gold Medal for Best Literary Novel of 2002. His second novel, Saints at the River, appeared in 2004. His work is steeped in Appalachian history and culture, making clear how much this rich tradition has to say to us, no matter where we're from. Curtis Wood, a professor of history at Western who chaired the Parris Professor search committee, describes Ron Rash as a "powerful voice of and for the region." Saints at the River begins with a tragic scene, one all too common in the Appalachian Mountains. A child of twelve has waded into the river above a waterfall. The current is much faster than she realizes; she loses her footing, is swept into a hydraulic, and drowns. Rash explains when discussing his book that he derived the scene from an image that haunted him, that of a child staring up at him through water. In a prologue to the novel, he describes the child's death in chiseled prose, ending it with the mystical image of a prism whose colors are "voices that swirl around her head like a crown" (Saints, p. 5). The final chilling line ends with the words "and she becomes part 72 of the river" (Saints, p. 5). This event on the river sets up the central conflict for the novel and links Saints at the River with the rest of Ron Rash's work, both poetry and fiction. Water is immensely significant throughout his work, as is the intimate connection between the living and the dead. Readers of Rash's works encounter images ofbodies lost and searched for, of water as both grave and resurrection ground, and of water itself as a holy substance, as in the line, "a river is a vein in the arm of God," from the poem, "A Preacher Who Takes up Serpents Laments the Presence of Skeptics in His Church" in the poetry collection, Among the Believers. As Saints at the River begins in earnest, the story is told in the voice of a single narrator, Maggie Glenn, a photographer for a city newspaper who has been offered the chance to cover the story. Although originally from Oconee County, where the child has drowned in the Tamassee River, Maggie has long since moved away. She and her colleague, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter named Allen Hemphill, set out to investigate this potentially explosive situation which pits environmental activists, who are trying to protect the "Wild and Scenic" status of the river, against the parents of the dead child, who are desperate to retrieve her body regardless of the cost to the river. Complicating matters further, developers stand ready to benefit from any shift in interpretation of what constitutes "wild and scenic" protection for a watercourse. Rash said at a reading that he set out "to write an environmental novel" and that he wanted "real conflict and tension" as opposed to all the issues coming across as black and white. He accomplishes this objective by making both the parents of the child and the environmental activists into complex and often sympathetic characters. He also brings to life the local people who...