The New ValleyJosh WeilGrove Press |
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Reviewed by Stacy Muszynski
Since hearing Josh Weil read from his trio of linked novellas The New Valley in Austin this past July, I've savored the book's beautiful prose twice, dog-earing more pages than I've left alone. Its surprising and dead-on dialogue and spare language depict Weil's rural Virginian landscape and the isolated, reticent men it shapes—men who are no kin to grace, aching as they do for human connection while they plow through their lonely lives. Even on the second reading I've pressed the sweatshirted crook of one elbow then the other to my eyes only to finally give up and reach for the Kleenex box. Also: the jokes still catch.
This writer, he's the real deal. He stirs something deep.
As sunny and effusive as Weil's off-the-page presence is, his on-the-page narration hits serious, immediate, and personal:
I want to say right here what I am sorry. I am sorry for where you is at and how you got there and I am sorry for calling you to the scene of the crime, as they say, and for the crime, and for if I hurt you something what's took too long to heal. Most off I am sorry about your wife.
So begins "Sarverville Remains," the final emotion-squeezing novella in Weil's triptych, which I read first because he read from it more than a month ago and I couldn’t get the narrator's voice out of my head. It belongs to Geoffrey, a mentally "diminished" and heartfully earnest thirty-something in love with another man's wife, Linda, whom he meets just as she's about to give away Monday night blow jobs to his teenage buddies out behind the bar where she works.
Just another night in the strange rural valley of The New Valley's Appalachia.
Weil's skill at strange is our gift: He gives us people we do not recognize, will never know, but then bit by bit we begin to see the resemblances between them and us, rather than the differences. As Geoffrey first observes Linda, in his simple way—"Her hair was come undone"—and as she warily notes his differences—"They make fun of you?" she asks—the strange starts to feel strangely real. Tender. Ordinary. Truer than before. “I wonder does she come and visit you,” Geoffrey writes to Linda’s incarcerated husband, but I know this is Geoffrey imagining himself, the empathic “Plum Head” who misses Linda desperately. His steely softness works its magic: I want Geoffrey and Linda to survive, unscathed, despite the unraveling I know will come since I read line one. And I’m back to eyeing that Kleenex box.
Meanwhile, Weil is subtly and seamlessly at work, creating separate histories and futures for the couple even as he eviscerates the notion of their marriage through secondary characters, including Geoffrey's uncomfortable half-sister Jackie and her until-now miserable husband Roy:
Why can't you let him be, Roy said. He said it quiet to the fish in the lagoon but she talked to him just as loud.
Be what? she said.
Alive, he said.
In love? she said. She sounded like she was giving him one of her mean smiles, but there was nothing on her face at all.
Go to hell, Roy said.
Nice, she said. In front of the baby.
He's not a kid, Roy said.
Might as well be, Jackie said.
Elsewhere Weil's sentences uncover other restive New Valley men, including Osby Caudill and Stillman Wing, the two reticent leading men (or, if Osby’s name is any indicator, b-o-y-s in a jumble) of the collection.
We meet lonely, disaffected cattle farmer Osby in the book's opener, "Ridge Weather," where he
glances to the side to see if his father's fallen asleep yet. The other end of the ratty brownish-orange couch was, of course, empty. Seeing it, he tried to feel whether he missed the old man. He couldn't tell. He lay down, stretching his legs out all the way along the couch. True, it felt odd to do that. He tried to picture his dad sitting there where his feet were now. It should have been easy; after all, Cortland has sat there nodding off practically every evening since Osby was a kid. But he couldn't picture him. [H]e thought he saw his father's face looking in at him through the window, not as he looked in life, but as Osby had found him in three days ago in the Old House: his lower jaw and half of his right cheek blown off, one eye exploded in its socket.
Osby himself is going to die (violently and at his own hand) if his broken heart doesn't get an injection of life, quick. And ironically, it's the injection of life he gives that yanks him from his father’s path (and end), releases him from his emotional paralysis, and opens him up to feel and be indispensable to someone or something in the world. Weil accomplishes this feat with exceptionally clear prose even as he conflates then rips apart Osby’s and his ailing steer’s lives. It’s one more feather in Weil’s cap—his ability to make plot events work double-, triple-, and quadruple-time.
Here's just one moment of that life-giving/life-receiving scene:
All the time he'd spent down in the gulley with the steer, the way he'd talked to it, given it a name—he was ashamed of that. He didn't say any good-byes, just jabbed the needle in. The steer's eye bulged. The muscle under Osby's leg jerked, once. He raised the bottle high, wanting the liquid to run in fast, do it quick.
And then Osby was off the ground. The mass of muscle and meat erupted under him, slamming against his chest, the moist, hot scent of it so close it was as if he was smelling the inside of its ribs.
Weil's patient honing in on his people's quiet desperation allows him to hone in on rural Appalachia, too. Page after page, he brings to life the sights and sounds and smells of his fictional valley, these sensory details coming together to give flesh and voice to the region’s physical-cum-emotional reality, as in this passage from "Ridge Weather":
[The people of Eads county were] scattered all over the valley, hidden from each other by the old ridges and thick woods, by log walls of age-sunk cabins, new ranch-house brick, by paint-peeling clapboard and trailer home siding so thin the propane bill is twice what it should be, never mind the electricity from the glowing space heaters that struggle in each room.
The characters in Josh Weil's novellas are often shut away in places just like this, but if you read closely, you will see them sneak out, sometimes even triumphantly, as in the following line, which comes from Stillman Wing’s morbidly obese risk-taking, fuck-loving daughter Caroline, and for my $22, the joy-drunkest line in the book’s 352-finely crafted pages: “And no matter how much ass-bark tea you drink and Chinese wing-bat shit you do, you don’t know what’s going to get you in the end.”
No, we really don’t. Not even Stillman Wing, who spent more than 70 years and just over 100 pages living as carefully constructed a life as his hard-partying parents and almost-wife did not, not even he had a clue what would get him in the end. Only Josh Weil does, and he reveals that end to us through his damn fine storytelling, the kind that isn’t concerned with perfection but rather the pursuit of slow, gentle, haunting grace, grace that turns the world around until it is new, until it hurts us again as only grace can.