'Serena's' setting frames story of women, ambition
Ron Rash lives in western North Carolina, where the Appalachian Mountains provide one of the more breathtaking landscapes in North America.
But about 70 years ago, the verdant tree-topped landscape was barren. Logging companies had stripped the region of forests to the point where the mountaintops were "scalped," Rash says of photographs he's seen from the early 1930s.
"There was no concern about the fact this was destroying the streams, or even thinking about that," Rash says. "But the great thing about trees is that they will grow back. The ridges that were bald, you won't know it unless you know something about timber. This is all second- or third-growth trees. Now, you don't see it, because the trees have grown."
That era, when lumber companies ran amok, is revisited in "Serena," a new novel. But while the cast includes ruthless timber barons and hardy -- perhaps foolhardy -- men who risk their lives working as loggers, the book, as its title implies, is a woman's story.
Actually it's about two women: Serena, who marries Pemberton, a logging magnate, and surreptitiously exerts her influence over the company, and Rachel, a young camp worker with whom Pemberton has fathered a child.
Rash, who is also a poet, says the novel started with the image of Serena riding a horse, "the sun coming up behind her, touching her golden hair like a crown. Someone regal, almost like a goddess."
He realized, however, that he needed a foil to balance the story; thus, Rachel, whose father Pemberton kills in the opening scene.
While Rash says stories tend to come to him and "I run with it"; he also felt like he was drawing from untold stories.
"It struck me as I got deeper in the book that there are very few women in American literature who have real power," he says. "There are plenty of women who have power within a family, but women who have the real kind of power, to kill people, to control a 100 men, as in this case. That was intriguing to me; we don't have that many views of that kind of women, particularly during the Depression."
In "Serena," the Pembertons are particularly agitated that attempts are being made to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park from their land. That story particularly hit home with Rash; his ancestors lost land via eminent domain to create the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs through Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Thousands of people were displaced to create the park and the highway.
"It's a very mixed blessing," Rash says of the national park. "I look at development in this region, and I know, as one pundit said, there'd be a huge waterslide from Asheville (N.C.) to Knoxville (Tenn.), a theme park. But at the same time, reading the stories (of people) who were taken off their land is heartbreaking, particularly when you read these oral histories. It's a very complex issue, and I think that's the area that fiction does best. I think what literary fiction sometimes does best is deal with those questions we don't necessarily have answers for, but we raise as important questions."
"Serena" is constructed in four acts and mimics the structure and dynamics of a Greek tragedy. Rash wanted a larger-than-life character (Serena) at the center of story, and also was influenced by the work of Christopher Marlowe. He employs a chorus, comprised of loggers, to add commentary throughout the novel.
In "Serena," however, these voices are not merely a fictional element, but echoes of the past. Rash was able to track down several men in their 90s who worked the logging camps.
"The great thing about doing those kind of interviews is you get things, little details you could never imagine, or think up," he says. "Things that very often you wouldn't get in a history text."
Thus stories about avoiding rattlesnakes and handling saws. But the greatest fear of many loggers, according to one of Rash's sources, were widowmakers, branches that were snapped off when a tree fell, then got caught in an adjacent tree.
"They might hang 30 seconds, they might hang two days," Rash says. "There was nothing you could do; there was no precaution you could take."
Additional Information:
'Serena'
Author: Ron Rash
Publisher: Ecco, $24.95, 311 pages
Capsule Review:
Ambition trumps desire -- and everything else -- in 'Serena,' Ron Rash's novel set in the mountains of Appalachia during the Depression. The title character is a cunning, dynamic woman who marries a wealthy timber baron, then proceeds to take control of the business. Serena's story is in counterpoint to that of Rachel, a young girl who bears the child of Serena's husband.
Rash's portraits of the women are very good, but better yet is his evocation of life in a logging camp. There are severed hands, fatal accidents and vivid depictions of the era's economic woes, balanced by the camaraderie of the logging camp, where even in the most desperate of times, small pleasures are to be found.
