The World Made Straight

Ron Rash

Canongate, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

FOR A suitable introduction to the works of Appalachian author Ron Rash look no further than his third novel, The World Made Straight. Published in 2006, filmed in 2015 and reissued this month (for perhaps no better reason than to give people an excuse to talk about Ron Rash), it’s a spare, purposeful vehicle for themes he’s still exploring more than a decade later.

You could read his recent novel Above The Waterfall straight afterwards and barely notice the transition. Both take place in a rural North Carolina where fireflies come out at night and where learning about different varieties of trout is an essential part of a boy’s upbringing. In both books, veering off the beaten track might lead you to a secret marijuana plantation, or even a backwoods meth lab. (One character in The World Made Straight complains that the worst thing the hippies did was introduce rednecks to drugs.)

His prose rooted in the Appalachian soil, Rash delivers a tough realism suffused with the tradition of Southern Gothic and the sense of a past that refuses to let the present alone. It comes together in A World Made Straight, a focused and neatly structured novel sustained by the dim memories of dark events and the anticipation of more to come.

Sometime in the 1970s, 17-year-old Travis Shelton stumbles on a small marijuana farm while out fishing. Brushing aside his fear of the landowners, the dreaded Toomeys, he uproots a few plants and sells them to local dealer Leonard. On a return visit, he realises the Toomeys were ready for him only when a bear trap closes around his ankle. Having extracted the promise that he’ll tell the police nothing, the Toomeys set him free. Soon after this, his tobacco farming father, who has never shown Travis anything but contempt, finally pushes him over the edge and he moves in with drug dealer Leonard instead.

Leonard (played by a jarringly clean-cut Noah Wyle in the movie) is a disgraced former teacher who shares his trailer with books, records and drug casualty Dena. Under Leonard’s wing, the school dropout’s dormant desire to learn awakens – sparked off by accounts of a Civil War atrocity that took place in that very county. From that seed grows the hope that Travis will find the inner resources to better himself – if his impulsiveness doesn’t bring about his own downfall first.

The resulting tension is underscored by the feeling that the events of the Civil War are still exerting an influence over the characters, and in Leonard’s musings about “landscape as destiny”, the belief that made him flee the wide-open spaces to “live in the passive voice” in mountainous North Carolina.

It’ll never be called a major novel, but The World Made Straight is the distilled essence of what makes Rash stand out among contemporary American authors. He’s writing about a part of the world he understands intimately, and where redemption is always a possibility, but the path to it is murky and far from straight.