Young Washington trailer reaction

“COLD DEAD HANDS!” William Franklyn-Mille in Young Washington (2026)

Let me start with a favorite passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in 1858, less than sixty years after George Washington’s death:

“Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

This is not only funny—and I love the reactions it gets from students—it succinctly gets at a problem with iconic historical figures. Some are so important, so mythic, that a version of them with ordinary human qualities stripped, planed, and sanded away supplants them in our historical imaginations. In American history this may be more true of George Washington than anyone else. Tellingly, even in commenting on this phenomenon Hawthorne gets something wrong: Washington didn’t wear powdered wigs.

Last week a new trailer for an Angel Studios release called Young Washington came to my attention—fortuitously as I was pulling up a video for my US History I class. The film appears to cover George Washington’s experiences during the first couple years of the French and Indian War, from the ill-fated patrol in which, as the 21-year old commander of a small force of Virginia militia, he accidentally precipitated a global war, through the Battle of the Monongahela, in which a British force was cut apart and nearly annihilated and where, as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the fatally wounded British General Edward Braddock, Washington helped save what was left of the army.

Here are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with more details.

As it happens, this is one of my favorite stories to tell in class, and I’ve long thought it would make a great movie. So discovering a trailer for Young Washington has gotten me both excited and anxious.

If you want to get at the person beneath the mythology and iconography—especially of great and consequential leaders like Washington—it requires deep interest and long, purposeful study. Most people can manage perhaps one of these, more often neither. For them, a good historical movie can untangle the bundle of traits and props that make up the imaginary versions of historical figures, presenting them with a real human being perhaps for the first time. But the movie has to be good. The damage of a false movie portrait can be permanent.

What follows are rough impressions and questions based on this early trailer for Young Washington:

• This teaser is heavy on battle scenes—not that I’m complaining. I’m pleased to see throughout the representation of regulars (paid, uniformed professionals), militia in a wide variety of clothing, and allied Indians on both sides. I doubt Young Washington will nail this the way The Last of the Mohicans did but that this complexity is so clearly visible even in this trailer is heartening.

• Ben Kingsley plays Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie was Scottish and twenty years younger than Kingsley when the French and Indian War broke out.

• The Angel logo appears over what looks like Braddock’s expedition, which set out into the wilderness of western Pennsylvania with a long wagon train and no road. Great atmosphere in this shot.

• Washington’s leather-looking coat at approx. 0:20 is a good spot to talk about uniforms and costumes. I’m not a mid-18th century guy but beyond the basic red-for-British/white-for-French the uniforms don’t look right to me. The leather coat is of a piece with modern Hollywood’s tendency to give the star slightly more contemporary-looking costumes, e.g. Orlando Bloom’s boot-cut hose in Kingdom of Heaven. The Revolutionary War spy series “Turn” gave Abraham Woodhull similar modern takes on 18th-century clothing: leather when everyone else is in wool, hipster toboggan, bad boy scowl. At least our young Washington isn’t constantly glowering.

• Scenes of Washington surveying the Virginia wilderness: A+ for effort. Can’t comment on 18th-century surveying equipment but the outdoor clothing looks better than the uniforms and the landscape looks exactly right. People tend to forget Washington’s work as a surveyor (and his chance to get a look at what’s out there right before it became available to speculators) so it’s good to see him working his day job.

• The film provides Jane Austen fans with a ball. Washington is accurately shown not wearing a wig but inaccurately—unless this is an accident of low light and color grading—as a brunette. Washington had red hair. He was also 6’2” at a time when that placed him head and shoulders above most other men, something you don’t really get here (but that HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries nailed). Even as a young man he was striking and physically imposing.

• A French officer goads Washington with “You are not British yet they send you to speak for them. So that when you fail they’ll have someone to blame.” This introduces some sketchy interpretation. Washington and all the other colonials absolutely considered themselves British at this time. It’s a later nationalist myth that we strapping Americans had already discovered ourselves to be a new, independent species and were just waiting for the right time to buck off the shackles of the Old World. (Even the great Last of the Mohicans tacks into these waters a bit.) See Fred Anderson’s books below for more on that.

• The wagon train in the woods features in few quick shots, presumably of Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela. Can’t comment at this point how accurately the film will portray the battle overall, but these shots capture the chaos well.

• After the Battle of Jumonville Glen and his surrender at Fort Necessity (and I can’t be sure that anything in this trailer relates to that event), Washington left the Virginia militia to volunteer as a gentleman aide-de-camp to General Braddock, played by Andy Serkis. As with Kingsley’s Dinwiddie, we don’t get much to judge by here, but Braddock comes across as rather hostile to Washington—a bit of lordly British stereotype. Washington actually liked Braddock, wrote positively of him, and learned a lot during his month under his command.

• Scenes of combat in the forest look appropriately messy, panicked, and dirty, with a mix of men fleeing and courageously holding their positions. It’s also atmospheric as heck. Points for that. The one thing we miss is the massive primeval trees of the colonial American woodlands, something no movie would probably be able to recreate now.

• We also get Washington taking unofficial charge of part of the battle. Washington was not only physically large and powerful, he was ridiculously brave. You might know that he found multiple bulletholes in his coat following the Battle of the Monongahela (which Kingsley’s Dinwiddie seems to allude to at the beginning of the trailer) but he also had two horses shot out from under him. Braddock, before he was mortally wounded, also demonstrated immense courage and had several more horses killed beneath him. I’ll be curious to see how the film treats his relationship with Washington and how they’re depicted in battle. A lot of movies about heroic figures downplay the courage others to make their subjects look better—a trap I hope they avoid.

• Some other famous names associated with Braddock’s expedition: Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, Benjamin Franklin. Curious to know if any of these will show up in the film. It would make sense to include Franklin, as he later told stories—including in his Autobiography—of having tried to warn Braddock about his plan of attack.

• A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at 1:27 seems to show the moment Washington’s patrol started a global war: allied Iroquois leader Tanaghrisson “The Half-King” killing French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in cold blood. Describing this moment never fails to startle students.

• A final name-drop shot gives us an appropriately young-looking Young Washington. He doesn’t seem to have much human personality in this teaser but, well, it’s a teaser.

Lots to dig into here, and for what it’s worth I enjoyed the trailer—and picking it apart for historical clues. For now I’m curious but not particularly optimistic. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In the meantime, if you want make an effort to get at the real young Washington and his time—whether you end up seeing the movie or not—let me recommend the following:

• For a good shorter biography that pays attention to Washington’s early experiences in the French and Indian War as well as his pre-Revolution life of surveying and land speculation: Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader, by Robert Middlekauff.

• For the fascinating, underappreciated story of the French and Indian War, I’d recommend either of two books by Fred Anderson: The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War or, for a much more detailed version, his mammoth Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

• For Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne specifically there’s Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, by David Preston.

Young Washington just started shooting in Ireland last month and won’t be out until next July 4th, so who knows what the final product will be like? We certainly don’t need, per Hawthorne, Washington nude—even HBO didn’t give us that, shockingly—but if we can get past the stately bows and powdered wigs to the real young man who fought for king and crown in the French and Indian War, who struggled to master his temper, who trooped through the forest bearing chains and compass and later rifle and sword, and who wrote to his brother describing how “charming” the sound of whizzing bullets was, I’ll be glad.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

How fragility honors the dead

I’m currently reading and almost finished with Ron Rash’s latest novel, The Caretaker. One of the main characters, Blackburn Gant, is a disfigured polio survivor and the titular caretaker of a church graveyard in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn, owing to his occupation, his outsider status in the town, and the events of the novel, has a mind consumed with death, regret, and his quiet duty to render proper respect to the dead in his little patch of ground.

Late in the novel, as the plot builds toward a climactic confrontation, Blackburn walks into town and has this small moment:

“As he neared Middlefork, Blackburn saw to the left where, among broken slabs of stone, small blue flowers bloomed. If you came upon periwinkle in woods or a meadow, Wilkie said a graveyard likely had been there. It had always struck Blackburn how something fragile as a flower could honor the dead longer than stone. Longer than memory too, a lot longer.”

A beautiful and evocative passage. Sarah has told me that daffodils, which might surprise you in scattered clusters or even great bright patches in the middle of the woods as you drive through the rural South, often mark the sites of old homeplaces. Ever since she pointed that out I’ve noticed them everywhere, vanished homesteads, without even the usual stone marker of a lonely chimney, and I’ve often felt something of what Blackburn feels here.

At least in the South, businesses that cut tombstones describe themselves as selling monuments. One wonders just how much of our purposeful effort to remember or be remembered—no matter how monumental—will survive while the small, accidental, fragile things with which we’ve marked a loss or even just the passing of time will outlast both them and us.

Portis on the New South

Main Street in a purportedly Southern city

Since rereading Gringos back at the beginning of this month I’ve been revisiting more of the late lamented Charles Portis’s work, particularly the short stories and travel essays collected in Escape Velocity. This comes from his magnificent memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in the Atlantic in 1999. Throughout, Portis uses the phrase “combinations of Jacksons” to denote a certain kind of rural, unsophisticated, rambunctious, indeed ungovernable but good Southerner. Salt of the earth, good folks—an instantly recognizable type.

Here, Portis moves from describing how the support of a great uncle who rode with Quantrill and Jesse James for Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, infuriated other Confederate veterans in 1904 (“Unseemly spectacle, coots flailing away”) to make an aside about the gradual, creeping fulfilment of the hopes of the Henry Gradys of the South:

For more than a century now, at intervals of about five years, southern editorial writers have been seeing portents in the night skies and proclaiming The End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South. By that they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country, and this time they may be on to something, what with our declining numbers of Gaylons, Coys, and Virgils, and the disappearance of Clabber Girl Baking Powder signs from our highways, and of mules, standing alone in pastures. Then there is the new and alien splendor to be seen all about us, in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers, though I’m told that deep currents are flowing here, far beyond the ken of editorial wretches in their cluttered cubicles. A little underground newsletter informs me that these peculiar glass structures are designed with care, by sociologists and architects working hand in glove with the CIA, as dark and forbidding boxes, in which combinations of Jacksons are thought least likely to gather, combine further, smoke cigarettes, brood, conspire, and break loose out of a long lull.

The essay is tinged throughout with a ubi sunt melancholy, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than here.

I live just outside a city of exactly the New South described here—glossy, polished, deracinated, full of outsiders. Not so much out-Yankeeing the Yankee as letting him take over. (Here’s a spoof I recently discovered. You laugh so you don’t cry.) I think Portis was onto something. I also hope he turns out to be wrong, that the pendulum will swing back, that his Jacksons will “break loose” and combine again.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

On the appeal of Southern grotesquery to outsiders

The film adaptation of Delia Owens’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing came out this weekend. I’ve been curious about the book since I heard it described as Southern gothic, but haven’t gotten around to reading it. My wife did, though, and mostly enjoyed it, so she was curious about the film and yet more curious when its wave of negative reviews washed in ahead of opening day. The opening line of Kyle Smith’s (paywalled) review in the Wall Street Journal especially piqued her interest, and so she shared it with me:

“Ten years ago, the Southern-Gothic film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” swept up four Academy Award nominations by pandering to the affinity of Northern intellectuals toward Romantic portrayals of poor folks living in a kind of fascinating harmony with cruel nature.”

Smith’s not so implicit critique here, about the favoritism awarded “Southern” stories that flatter the ineradicable preconceived notions of Yankee audiences, naturally brought to mind this favorite passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”:

“Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Both of these lines deal with Southern stereotypes, with Smith connecting them to a kind of noble savage trope and O’Connor noting especially astutely their persistence and flexibility. Her own work is a case in point, often taken literally as a representation of the bigotry and violence of the South when O’Connor was making broader, explicitly theological points in as bold a fashion as she could. In her own words, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Deliverance. The movie is a searing piece of survival drama but James Dickey’s novel, a brilliant, intense, exhausting masterpiece, goes even deeper—into the psychological, the spiritual, the fundamental good and evil secreted in the ignorant deeps of even civilized man. There’s a lot going on there. But its grotesquery, its “large and startling figures,” has been received superficially as meme-worthy objects of prurience or titillation by an audience too satisfied with its assumptions about hillbillies to hear its message. Look at what those people are like, a lot of otherwise smart people have said in response. Paddle faster! I hear banjos.

I suppose in the end you can only write with St John’s injunction in mind: “He that hath an ear, let him hear.” Write for the ones who have ears to hear.

I can’t read much more of Smith’s review, but from the subtitle’s use of the word “charmless” and the headline “Unfevered Swamps” I think I can guess its overall tenor. I have no idea if it’s fair to the film or not. You can read O’Connor’s essay in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which is a must-read for fiction writers and anyone interested in writing or the South. It is perhaps her most quotable work of non-fiction, and includes this other magnificent zinger:

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

God help us if we ever lose that.

Southern meanness, Southern politeness

James Dickey as the Sheriff of Aintry in the film adaptation of his novel Deliverance

Over the weekend I ran across Florence King’s With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy while browsing my favorite used book store. King (1936-2016) was a Southern humorist, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and longtime columnist for William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review. Her specialty was misanthropy—the dislike of mankind.* I had heard her name invoked quite often by other writers for that magazine, and they always spoke with immense affection and admiration for her razor wit and savagely keen eye for human stupidity. So when I saw her name on the spine I grabbed it and started flipping through it.

This passage hooked me. Near the end of a lengthy description of Ty Cobb’s famous temper and general gruffness, King writes:

The Southerner’s famous mean streak is usually attributed to a murky sadomasochism involving fears and fantasies of interracial sex, but I suspect it is really a reaction against the demands of Southern hospitality.

This caught my attention for two reasons. First, it is the fashion, in our sex- and race-obsessed age, to ascribe everything weird or distinct about the South and Southerners to anxieties surrounding miscegenation. This is seldom invoked as a sole causal factor but it is more and more often the first line of explanation, though it fails for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it was not unique to the South. Second, King’s suspicion jibes precisely with an observation made by the Coen brothers some years ago, about which more below.

King, delightfully, goes on:

South Carolina novelist Blanche McCrary Boyd writes: “Southerners are as polite as cattle, except when they’re not. When they’re not, they might shoot you or chase you around the yard with a hatchet.”** Living up to a reputation is an exhausting business. It is humanly impossible to be as gracious as Southerners are supposed to be, but we long ago got in too deep. The rest of the country came to believe our propaganda and, fatally, we came to believe it ourselves.

In consequence, we produced monsters of hospitality who cast a pall of incessant, unbearable niceness over the entire region. All classes participated in the torture. The aristocratic prototype of hospitality is the crystalline great lady of whom it is said, “She’s kindness itself.” The plain-folks prototype was my grandmother, the miles gloriosus of the spare cot, constantly braying, “We’ll make room!” and issuing jocular threats about what she would do to a guest who even thought about leaving too soon. (“I’ll just tie you right up and keep you here!”)

Hospitality carried to such extremes is bound to create its opposite, and so we produced the misanthropic good ole boy who greeted out-of-state travelers with speeding tickets or unmarked graves, depending upon his mood. If Ty Cobb had not been a ballplayer he would have made a great Georgia sheriff.

In his first book The Southern Tradition at Bay, Richard Weaver briefly describes the some noteworthy elements of the famous caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. Sumner, in a speech laced with sexual innuendo (there’s that projection, again), had insulted Brook’s dying uncle, Senator Andrew Butler. Weaver notes that, as Brooks prepared to avenge this insult, he “deliberated for two days over whether to use the horsewhip, the cowhide, or the cane for his assault upon Senator Sumner because a different degree of insult was implied by each.”

That’s the same care taken in seeing to the comfort of guests applied to the avenging of an insult. The Coen brothers once said that part of their inspiration for Fargo was their observation that “the most polite societies are also the most violent societies.” Compare the courtliness and cold-bloodedness of Arthurian chivalry or the Nibelungenlied, the oathbound rules of host and guest in the Eddas or Beowulf, or the brutal vengeance of Odysseus upon the suitors—the latter a straightforward case of redressing an abuse of hospitality.

The key factor in all of these examples is honor, of course, and King’s observation should ring true the moment you dip into the study of any honor culture. Understand the seemingly paradoxical relationship between mild-mannered courtesy and violence, and how honor adjudicates these conflicting impulses, and you’ll have grasped something important about Southerners. Until then you can only misunderstand and dismiss.

Ty Cobb’s meanness, by the way, has been grossly exaggerated. He was tough, competitive, and extremely aggressive, but as Charles Leerhsen demonstrates in his excellent recent biography A Terrible Beauty, most of the stories of Cobb’s frothing-at-the-mouth psychosis and racism are either caricatures or lies. Check that book out for sure, especially if you love baseball. Here’s a sample of Leerhsen’s findings from Hillsdale College’s Imprimis.

Oh—and I bought King’s book. Can’t wait to read the rest.

Notes

*I am a wannabe misanthrope, too lily-livered and obliging to embrace the lifestyle. I therefore find people like King wonderfully amusing. We need them the same way Lear needed his Fool.

**True story—An aunt of mine, one of the saintliest, kindest, most hospitable and charitable people God ever graced me in knowing, quite famously chased my grandfather around the yard with a hatchet when they were children. His offense? He had eaten a piece of watermelon she had claimed for herself.

The Line that Held Us

It’s been quite a while since a novel has gotten its hooks into me the way The Line that Held Us did. Set in the rural North Carolina mountains near where I went to high school, this story by David Joy opens with an accidental killing that leads to lies, more lies, and ever more violence—including murder.

Darl Moody is hunting on another man’s property, hoping to shoot an out-of-season buck for some extra meat, when he spots what he takes to be a wild hog rooting around the forest in the twilight. He shoots it and finds that he’s actually killed Carol “Sissy” Brewer, a simpleminded man he knew in high school. Like Darl, Sissy was poaching—ginseng, in this case. Darl is terrified. He’s not only accidentally killed a man while committing a crime himself, the victim is a Brewer, and the Brewers are a white trash family known for their independence and violence. Sissy’s brother Dwayne is a ruthless giant who delights in provocation and cutting people down to size, and he’s the devoted protector of his little brother. If Darl confesses to the killing he’ll go to jail—and he’ll have to contend with Dwayne.

Faced with this dilemma, Darl tries to wriggle his way out of it and calls up his best friend, Calvin Hooper. After a lot of begging, Darl convinces Calvin to help him cover up the killing, and they bury Sissy in one of Calvin’s fields.

This accident and their response to it set in motion a cycle of lies, suspicion, and violence. Dwayne, whom we first meet bullying some bullies in the Franklin Walmart, proves an excellent detective and wreaks terrible vengeance as he works his way toward the truth of what happened to his missing brother. Darl and Calvin, for their part, repeatedly double down on their lies, seeking refuge in the continually shrinking cover of untruth and exposing themselves and the people they love to more and more danger.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot, but it surprised me several times—again, something I haven’t felt in a lot of my recent fiction reading. And I haven’t felt such a keen sense of dread in a long time, either. Both of these things—the surprising turns and the steadily mounting dread—stem from the powerful characters Joy has created.

Darl and especially Calvin feel like real people; I pictured them as some of the guys I grew up and went to high school with. I know the type—think of an Appalachian Llewellyn Moss—and their actions are authentically motivated and true to life. They’re independent minded but bound by bone-deep obligations to the land and their families. Perhaps the only tie that proves stronger is their friendship. Joy develops real and recognizable secondary and tertiary characters, especially Coon Coward, the old loner, fiercely protective of his ginseng patch, upon whose property the story’s tragic hamartia begins.

But the real standouts among the supporting characters are the women—the mothers, sisters, and aunts that shore up mountain communities: “For as tough as the men were in these mountains,” he writes, “the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world.” Chief among them is Angie Moss, Calvin’s girlfriend. Angie embodies a seemingly paradoxical pair of hillbilly qualities: intense personal independence and unshakeable loyalty to other people—in this case, Calvin, and, as we find out early in the book, their unborn child. Angie plays a small but crucial role in the book, raising the stakes both for Calvin, whose lies ensnare him and then threaten to undo his world, and for Dwayne.

“Dwayne is an Old Testament prophet, moved to wrath by love.”

For Dwayne Brewer is the most arresting character in the book. Scarred by his upbringing but defiantly embracing it, a bundle of ideals and resentments, violence and tenderness, Dwayne quotes the Bible with the facility of a seminarian and believes unyieldingly in the rightness and immutability of God’s law, but leaves no room for forgiveness. He is an Old Testament prophet, moved to wrath by love. His sole motive in life is to protect his beloved brother; deprived of that, his mission becomes to foretell and inflict as much suffering on the transgressors as possible. He’s at his most terrifying when he has a point.

These character traits and bonds of loyalty and obligation drive the novel. Calvin helps Darl cover up his manslaughter out of brotherly love. Angie finds deep reserves of steadfastness, endurance, and courage out of love for her unborn child. And Dwayne wreaks the havoc he does out of love for his dead brother. And all of these characters—with the exception of Angie—wrestle with the consequences of their misplaced and disordered loves.

In a novel so attentive to the damage done to relationships and human lives by one primordial sin, the ensuing deceit, and the inevitable death and damnation that must come without an unforeseen and un-hoped for mercy, it cannot be coincidence that one of the protagonists is named Calvin.

The Line that Held Us is dark; violent; grotesque in the right ways and the right places, with torture, exhumations, and brutality I haven’t even mentioned; elegantly written, with an evident love for the mountains in which it takes place; and utterly gripping. I lost sleep—and at the busiest time of the semester—to finish this book. If you want a hard look at some of the places we can go out of love and loyalty, pick it up.

*****

You can watch Joy read the first chapter of The Line that Held Us and discuss the book as a whole here. I’m not surprised to learn that Joy is a fan of Ron Rash, as am I, and he also mentions Cormac McCarthy’s Lester Ballard in describing Dwayne. A good interview, well worth watching if my review has piqued your interest in this excellent novel.

Above the Waterfall

This week I read my second Ron Rash novel of the year, Above the Waterfall. I got through it in two days—it's excellent. 

Like most of Rash's fiction, Above the Waterfall takes place in the western North Carolina mountains, but unlike his historical novels Serena, One Foot in Eden, and The Cove, this story takes place in the present: a horribly real, recognizable present. This is the Appalachia of dependence—on distant relations to care for the children of failing families, on big-city resort developers and tourist dollars, on chemicals like painkillers, pot, and meth.

Les, a 51-year old Sheriff on the verge of retirement, and Becky, a middle-aged park ranger and Les's sometime romantic attachment, narrate the story in alternating chapters of present and past tense. Becky survived a school shooting as a girl and is still haunted by it in her mid-forties. She tries to dull the memories of the tragedy, her permanently disrupted family life, and her difficulty forming relationships by retreat into the wilderness and meditation on the beauty of the world. A devotee of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her chapters brim with his kind of allusive, fragmentary poetry as she pieces together her memories with her present struggles, particularly her difficult feelings for Les and the pain of a recently failed relationship with another nature lover, a man who turned out to be an eco-terrorist. 

While Les is an artist too—a painter of watercolors—his career in law enforcement has imparted to his narration a directness that sits uneasily with his artistic inclinations. After decades arresting drug addicts and wife beaters, identifying corpses, and bearing bad news to the parents of meth-addicted children, his matter-of-factness even seems like a coping mechanism, as if he can only deal with the horrors he sees by describing them without polish.

“What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.”

— Above the Waterfall

What unites Les and Becky, other than a brief fling, an interrupted love affair, is an elderly man named Gerald. Becky has struck up a friendship with Gerald who, bereft of his wife and only son, lives alone on ancestral land abutting a new but struggling mountain resort. Gerald's meth-addicted nephew takes advantage of his generosity every chance he gets. While Becky tries to help Gerald however she can, Les, pestered by the resort's owner, has to try to persuade Gerald not to poach the trout living in the resort's stretch of the creek that flows through both properties. 

The morning after an altercation in the resort parking lot that almost sends Gerald to the morgue, scores of fish wash up on the banks of the creek—poisoned with kerosene dumped into the stream above a waterfall where, according to Gerald, now rare speckled trout have returned. Gerald insists he's innocent, and Becky takes his side. Les, juggling the resort's problems and a harrowing series of meth busts, is just trying to keep the peace during his last days on the job. It's not enough.

This is my new favorite from Rash. What gripped me in my old favorite, One Foot in Eden, were the strongly drawn relationships—between the young couple at the beginning of the book, between the couple and a roguish neighbor, between the couple and their son many years later—and the threats that tested them—betrayal, adultery, lies, murder. Above the Waterfall shares these strengths but outdoes One Foot in Eden. With its cast of middle-aged characters, each of whom harbors hurts and secrets, each of whom struggle to overcome past sins and earn forgiveness, and with its setting in a dying world, this novel adds a thick layer of poignancy and theologically inflected melancholy. It moved me, and it made me think.

Above the Waterfall is a powerful portrait of a world in which all are guilty and the law is inadequate to mend such brokenness. It depicts a world in need of redemption, and Rash suggests, that redemption is available if the sinners just look for it. In Becky's words:

The next morning as I'd hiked out, I started to step over a log but my foot jerked back. When I looked on the other side, a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.