FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Burning BrightBy Ron Rash Canongate, 205pp, £14.99
THERE IS a young child so hungry she takes to sucking the eggs from her neighbour’s hen house, and continues doing so, even after her father killed the family dog that had been wrongly blamed for the crime. Another man is so poor he agrees to dig up long-buried soldiers in the hope of finding confederate memorabilia dating back to the US Civil War. Things go badly wrong and the bully who had devised the idea up and dies, felled by the effort of grabbing a sword from a corpse’s grip. The old watchman who had been guarding the graveyard – obviously not all that well – remarks to the narrator that he feels their secret is safe. “Far as I can tell you don’t say nothing unless it’s yanked out of you like a tooth.” In another story, a boy unintentionally helps pay for the drugs that are destroying his parents by taking the ring from the hand of a woman who died when her light aircraft crashed nearby. The gifted US poet and novelist Ron Rash allows fate to take full flight in this astonishing, diverse collection.
Burning Bright, the title story, with its echoes of Steinbeck, sees Marcie, a widow who has unexpectedly married her handyman, mainly because of social pressure, wondering who is starting all the fires, all the more serious because of the drought conditions. Marcie is a self-protecting kind of individual. "When her first husband, Arthur, had died two falls earlier of a heart attack, the men in the church had come the following week and felled a white oak on the ridge. They'd cut it into firewood and stacked it on her porch. Their doing so had been more an act of homage to Arthur than of concern for her, or so Marcie realised the following September when the men did not come." Carl is taciturn and strange, but a terrific handyman and, as Marcie comes to feel, her property. So she feels it is enough to pray for rain.
Rash possesses a realist's vision that resounds with truth yet never falters into the heavy handed righteousness of tone that at times burdens the prose of Cormac McCarthy with whom he has been compared. Readers of Rash's novel Serena(2008) will know what to expect and will be well rewarded here. Rash tells great stories, raw and powerful, but he is above all, an instinctive writer. These narratives, whether told in his laconic first person, or in a detached third-person voice, are well served by his flawless use of language. Every word carries meaning and intent. His dialogue is convincing. There is a sense of Daniel Woodrell's majestic novel Winter's Bone(2006) and most emphatically of all, the modified Southern cadences of Richard Bausch. Literary prizes incite all manner of rhetoric and riot but in winning the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award with this book, now published for the first time in Europe, Rash not only endorsed the quality of the competition, the judges honoured the short story form.
It is impossible to select the finest of Rash's stories, so good are they all, and so wide-ranging. He understands the way life works, the weird shifts and shimmies, the side steps, the inevitability. In Into the Gorge, a place seems to determine a family's history. "His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children . . . and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge . . . Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections." Jesse remembers all of this and more. He had been a young boy when she had wandered off to die alone in the gorge. The years have passed and now Jesse is old and not expecting to be caught by a park ranger in the act of harvesting his long dead father's crop of ginseng. "Can't you forget this," Jesse said. "It ain't like I was growing marijuana. There's plenty that do in this park." The ranger sneers at his captive and Jesse fights back, then fate and family history take over.
Memories burn deep images in the mind and a soldier returning home from war recalls a man that he killed and whose body he had then knelt by while performing a ritual that he had needed as much as the dead man had. Elsewhere during another war, a century earlier, a young woman while waiting for her husband to return, is surprised by the enemy in the form of an older man she had met while she was a child. He wants the horse she has kept hidden, she offers to trade herself instead. Personal anarchy sustains her vigil.
In The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars, Ruth, alone and middle-aged, decides to investigate something she had seen in a schoolbook when she was a child. She contacts the local zoo and asks the director if jaguars once roamed South Carolina. On her way there she thinks she has spotted a missing child. Having caused some chaos she then meets the director who reads her a moving account about the loyalty animals, in this case birds, display to each other.
The short story, particularly the American short story, as high art is celebrated throughout this uncompromising, candid collection that does indeed burn bright in every way.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
