With Serena, Ron Rash Crafts a Harrowing Tale of Depression-Era Appalachia
by Pete Kotz
George Pemberton arrives at the train station in Waynesville, N.C., with his new bride Serena. Through the window he sees Rachel Harmon, the teen who used to share his bed, now swollen with child. Beside her is her very pissed-off father. This is the Great Depression, after all. The day when you can impregnate one woman and marry another—while maintaining the use of your throat—is still decades away. Abe Harmon is about to throw George Pemberton a welcome party, its operative theme being vengeance.
He "carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton's heart," writes Ron Rash in the opening paragraph of his fourth novel, Serena.
Pemberton, a Boston raconteur turned Carolina lumber baron, quickly dispatches the older man, much to the approval of his wife. As Abe lies dying on the platform, Serena hands his knife back to Rachel with the frigidity of a medieval queen. "By all rights it belongs to my husband," she says. "It's a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one.... That money will help you when the child is born. It's all you'll ever get from my husband and me."
You don't expect such a brooding, violent opening from a man with Rash's bio. He's a professor of Appalachian studies at Western Carolina University, owner of an O. Henry Prize and author of 10 books, including three collections of poetry. Those simple, alarming words—professor, poetry—tend to telegraph a literary death march through obsessive self-analysis and the kind of "deep" prose that supersedes storytelling.
Then you remember the other details—the Appalachian studies, the fact that Rash's people have called those hills home since the 1700s—and it all comes together. This is not a man in service of literary fashion, but an author who wishes to illuminate his native turf. It is not hyperbole to say that, with Serena, he does so masterfully.
Meet the woman who may be one of the great villains of modern fiction, the mysterious Serena. She grew up in a Colorado lumber camp, though the details are sketchy. After her folks died, she ordered their homestead burned, every trace of her heritage turned to ash. Serena resurfaces in Boston, her sexual powers capturing Pemberton the night they meet. Soon she's the queen of Pemberton Lumber, equal to any man in camp and twice as mean.
Logging is a savage life—six days a week and dawn-till-dusk shifts—with falling timber and angry snakes making it as perilous as Vietnam. Exhibit A: "The limb fell toward Dunbar, whose back arched as his axe struck wood the same instant the sycamore limb entered between his collar bone and spine. Dunbar's face smashed against the ground as his knees hit, the rest of his body buckling inward.... It remained embedded in Dunbar's back like a stalled lightning bolt."
Yet Serena is immune to her workers' suffering: There are five replacements waiting on the commissary steps. Her concept of management begins with fear and ends with intimidation. And if that doesn't work, murder is always an option.
This attitude comes in handy when the feds arrive in Waynesville. Planning has begun for a vast national park, and the secretary of interior wants Pemberton's land. But Serena isn't cowed by D.C. dandies. Pemberton has bought off every banker and politician in western Carolina, save for the incorruptible sheriff. For those who won't bend to her will, Serena has a bullet or knife they can meet.
Despite the dramatic opening, readers may be tempted to bail early on. The dialogue between Serena and Pemberton initially comes off as wooden, even amateur. And Rash casts Serena with such abundant powers—beautiful, smart, master of business and nature—that you're tempted to see her as a cliché. But read on. Please.
Serena's rise is methodical, unyielding. As Rash adds characters—the prominent local tree hugger, the loggers who view Serena with a mixture of foreboding and awe—he vividly transports us to Depression-era Appalachia, where the basics of life are hell, and Serena is the she-devil who rules over all. Part environmentalist's story, part workingman's period piece, Serena seamlessly moves to sprinting thriller by tale's end, where the villain has evolved from superwoman to a sociopath so competently wicked you're just thankful she's a product of fiction.
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