Serena by Ron Rash
Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship. After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash. In the end I wasn’t disappointed so much as underwhelmed.
Serena is the story of the Pembertons and the swath they cut through the forests and communities of Depression-era North Carolina. Pemberton and Serena, his wife, are logger-barons, ruthlessly indifferent to the toll they are taking on the environment and on human life in their ambitious grasp for power and wealth. The body count of then novel is high, starting on the second or third page when Pemberton guts the father of a girl pregnant with his child. In retrospect, this death will seem one of the most reasonable of the novel’s killings, and if the husband seems cold he is a kitten in comparison to his wife, whose singular drive is the engine at the novel’s center.
Rash’s novel is an entertaining read that definitely seems timely given the self-and-other-destructive selfishness that seems to be the rising picture of Wall Street. Nevertheless, in the end its morality tale is a bit obvious. Serena is such an extreme character that one is at a loss as to what really beats within her breast, and her husband’s shows of mercy at certain points in the novel do no more than open up cracks that reveal little beyond them. Rash tempers the seriousness by introducing a sort of chorus of loggers who crack wise and philosophical in the background, but it’s hard to feel that one’s understanding is deepend by those comic moments–funny as they sometimes are.
Serena is not a bad book, by any means. But it shows its seams a little too clearly for my taste, both in the form and the point of its construction. At times I felt this was intentional–that Rash was trying to create a faithful homage to Greek tragedy, for example. At other times, I wasn’t so sure and I ultimately don’t think it matters. Serena does what it does, and it does it pretty well–but that’s not enough to earn it a home on my top shelf.