Southern fable from a master storyteller

Arkansas novelist Donald Harington has tilled his corner of the Ozarks for nearly 40 years, and the soil shows no signs of exhaustion. His yarns defy classification -- one reason you haven’t seen them on a rack at your neighborhood supermarket. They combine old-fashioned, down-home storytelling with postmodern, Nabokovian trickery. One of them, “The Cockroaches of Stay More,” is told entirely from the point of view of those pesky insects -- and that’s just a warm-up, as it turns out, for the cross-species communication in Harington’s latest novel, “With.”

The opening is apt to fool us. It reads like a supermarket novel, except that the first chapter seems to be narrated by a dog, and the prose has overtones of sophistication we don’t often hear in genre literature. A former state trooper, Sugrue Alan, plots to kidnap a 7-year-old girl, Robin Kerr, and live with her on an inaccessible mountaintop where the Madewell family once had a cooperage, cutting white-oak staves to make barrels and churns. Alan stocks the Madewells’ old cabin with supplies and justifies his pedophilic urges by calling Robin his “true love.”

After we’re all aboard, what appears to be a suspense novel jumps the tracks. Alan sickens and dies. The crime story turns into an improbable but richly detailed epic of survival. Rainstorms wash out the trails up Madewell Mountain. Robin has no source of information beyond the Bible and an 1880s manual on farming and housekeeping; no companions except frankly anthropomorphic animals -- dogs, beavers, chickens, a bobcat, a bear cub, a deer -- and the “in-habit” of 12-year-old Adam Madewell, who used to live there.

An “in-habit,” Harington explains, isn’t a ghost. Adam is still alive, in his late 30s, working in the wineries of California. But he left Arkansas reluctantly, and a part of his spirit remains, haunting the cooperage, learning the animals’ languages, whispering advice in Robin’s ear.

That a child, even a very intelligent child, could not only endure 11 years of cold, drought and wilderness hazards but also educate herself and stay in excellent physical and mental health -- well, we have no choice but to suspend disbelief and conclude that Harington has written a fable, however buttressed with facts about the natural world and traditional crafts. It’s a fable with echoes of the Garden of Eden and “Lolita,” often bawdy and comic but, at bottom, a meditation on an old Ozark hymn’s promise that after the sufferings of our lives “we’ll understand it all by and by.”

When Robin reaches 18, she’s ready for love. She loves Adam -- but the spectral Adam is still only 12, and the corporeal Adam, even if he returns to Arkansas, would seem to be too old. It takes many pages and no end of cleverness for Harington to resolve this dilemma, but if he wearies us a little, he also exposes us to one of America’s rarer literary sensibilities.

Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.

*

With

A Novel

Donald Harington

Toby Press: 492 pp., $19.95