First Fiction

One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash, Novello Festival Press: 222 pp., $21.95

Here’s Billy Holcombe, hardscrabble tobacco farmer and luckless fisherman, musing on the overwhelming predicament he’s found himself in: “I couldn’t outsmart a fish with a brain the size of a butter bean but here I was trying to out slick a sheriff who’d passed most of his life catching people like me.” The narrators who take turns telling this dark tale of infertility, infidelity and murder in a mountainous corner of South Carolina in the 1950s have their own unique ways of talking. And, as much as they seem to be in denial half the time, they can be, like Billy, downright startling in their self-assessments.

Ron Rash, the author of two story collections, gives these characters -- Billy, his wife, their son, the sheriff and the deputy -- enough twang to sucker us in. But he refuses to lay on the corn pone as he deftly orchestrates this backwoods mystery about a family up to its neck in trouble. The story itself is simple: The local ne’er-do-well Holland Winchester turns up missing and his batty mother insists that the innocuous Billy and Amy Holcombe have something to do with it. But in revealing the tangled interconnections between Billy, Amy and Holland, Rash gives us something considerably more complex than an Appalachian whodunit. Why, for instance, doesn’t Billy seem particularly distressed by the crime he’s apparently committed? Why would Amy Holcombe choose such a cruelly pragmatic method of dealing with her husband’s sterility? And who will even care once the whole valley gets flooded out by the big dam that Carolina Power is putting up?

There’s a disturbing sense in these pages that evil can be swallowed up by time or cleverness or disregard. But as the rising water begins to filter across the tobacco and cabbage fields, Rash ruefully suggests that past wrongs also have a disconcerting way of floating to the surface. Equal parts vintage crime novel and Southern Gothic, full of aching ambivalence and hard compromises, and rounded off by bad faith and bad choices, “One Foot in Eden” is a veritable garden of earthly disquiet.

*

Cold Water, Gwendoline Riley, Carroll & Graf: 166 pp., $20

“Cold Water,” a seductive novella about a 20-year-old barmaid working in a Manchester dive, won the prestigious Betty Trask Award when it was first published in England. It has the compelling immediacy of a sketch dashed off in the trenches of late adolescence. After all, its photogenic young author, Gwendoline Riley, is just a whisper older than Carmel McKisco, her drink-slinging, mildly adrift and wholly sympathetic heroine, and as slight as “Cold Water” is, its unvarnished reportage gives the book a surprising heft and an undeniable ring of authenticity. Compared to other baby writers who should be cramming for their finals rather than vetting manuscripts (and there’s been a slew of them lately), Riley gives us a voice that’s authoritative, crafty and wry. There’s maturity in it too, if only because she’s brave enough to let youth speak for itself. Carmel is a kind of pixie Bukowski in Converse All-Stars, making her way around suitably dire Manchester -- its rain-slicked streets, its used bookstores, its sweaty rock clubs -- without much direction or urgency. It’s that perfectly respectable young-adult listlessness that turns up in concerned editorials as “apathy.” Between shifts at the bar, Carmel tells us that her absentee parents are “pieces that have been removed from the game board,” that “when I go to the pictures I always sit in the very middle of the first row” and that “feelings can seem so fragile and unlikely, why not keep them strange and beautiful instead of sharing them with anyone who’ll listen[?]”

Carmel, you suspect, is a modern romantic with exceedingly low expectations and a very mellow lifestyle. She wonders about the tortured singer she used to follow as a teenager, now wasting away somewhere in a bed sit. She has a soul-stirring but inconclusive fling with an American backpacker. She spends a lot of time with her fellow barmaids. Yet for all the hanging out and hooking up, there’s little connection for Carmel, making “Cold Water” a classic cruel story of youth. But Riley tells it with affection and mildness, making this familiar tale -- of the sad yet enviably slack -- seem brand new.