Saints at the River

Yesterday I finished reading Ron Rash's Saints At The River. It was recommended by a friend of mine who used to be a river guide on the Tamassee River which serves as the heart of the story. What's interesting is that Rash has written a book which presents his readers, most which I would assume are pro-Green, a dilemma not so easy to resolve with platform rhetoric. Saints At The River tells the story of a family's attempt to reclaim his daughter's body from the river in which she drowned. It is the story of an environmentalist trying to enforce the Tamassee's designation as a Wild and Scenic River and therefore not allow the portable dam to be built which would have to be done to recover the girl's body. The story is told through the eyes a Maggie Glenn, an attractive (we must assume she is attractive because of all the descriptions of her blue eyes and the cut off jeans she used to wear) newspaper photographer who works for a paper in Columbia but is originally from closed in, mountainous Oconee County where the story take place. She and Allen Hemphill, a Pulitzer Prize nominee who now works at her paper, are sent to cover the debate over erecting a small portable dam to deflect the flow from over the waterfall which forms the hydraulic where the girl's body is trapped. The main character against setting up the dam is Luke, an ardent environmentalist and lover of the river and, oh by the way (just to make things interesting) Maggie's first lover. There is also the ensemble cast of stock characters: the developer, the small town sheriff, the good ol' boys, even a cheesy boss who is one of the most perfectly described characters in the novel. Rash reveals the story through straightforward prose that one will definitely consider good writing even if it makes no great strides in literary style. At times, especially when describing the face of the river at different times of the year, Rash's writing does take on a poetic quality that is similar to James Dickey's descriptive writing in Deliverance and those are the moments when the reader can bond with the river rather than just turning the page to find out what Maggie is doing. But Saints At The River is a page turner all the way up to its unanticipated ending. It asks the reader if personal convictions should be upheld at all costs, and quite literally, what is the cost of burying the dead.

I had never read this author before this book and I was wonderfully surprised to find a new favorite author. Mr. Rash does a great job of capturing the real culture and language of the mountaion people while weaving a plot that will keep you glued to the pages until the end. I literally could not put this book down until I finished it. I've already ordered his other books.

Seldom does a book make me choke up or shed a tear, but SAINTS AT THE RIVER was able to affect me emotionally as few other books in my life ever have. Perhaps it's because this story is from the south and after leaving the south a few years ago, I am often brought to tears when thinking about it because I miss it so much. Perhaps it's the lyrical way Mr. Rash has told this beautifully eerie story of the south that captured my heart. Perhaps it's the story itself, the death of a child in the first few pages that brought the tears. You be the judge. As I pack the book up and send it to my son, as I recommend it to a friend who I think might feel and appreciate what I did when I read it, I will again and again feel extremely lucky to have found it. As you read this you will find lines that are meant to touch you and do, that pull you into the middle of what everyone is living and feeling and dealing with in their own unique and personal ways. Don't pass this up.

In Saints at the River, Ron Rash returns to the same general region as his much acclaimed first novel, One Foot in Eden. But this novel has a contemporary setting and is more conventional than his previous offering. While the author does manage to deliver multiple viewpoints on an extremely complicated environmental issue, he does so through the eyes of a single narrator. There is a love interest and some characters that might seem like the stock variety if you're not from this area. Most of the power in this story is generated not by the emotional conflict of its characters, but by the author's ability to frame the simplistic with startlingly accurate, poetic imagery. Sure there are symbolic elements like the river as death, the human as the transitory beast that yearns for purpose, but what holds it all together is the prose style of a man who is certainly one of our finest poets.

Never a wasted word in the prose of poet Ron Rash, who sets the reader down at the heart of this deeply-connected Southern mountain community -- at the riverside, in the midst of a double tragedy and an environmental fight that no outsider is going to win. One wishes he had told us more, through his expatriate female narrator, about why she had put so many miles between her current life and this idyllic country and her own good people, but he's never going to tell too much about anything. Mr. Rash is mountain to the core,a spare and totally authentic voice, and that's just the way it is.