Serena: A Novel
by Ron Rash
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Book Reviews of Serena: A Novel
Book Review: Amazing, riveting story about the perils of unbridled ambition
Summary: 5 Stars
In the opening scene of Ron Rash's excellent new novel Serena, George Pemberton, ruthless and land-hungry timber baron, returns by train to his holdings near Asheville, NC in 1929, with Serena, his wife of two days, in tow. There to meet them at the station are Rachel Harmon--a former camp employee who is carrying Pemberton's unborn child--and her angry father, bent on revenge. At Serena's urging, Pemberton quickly settles the score, leaving his opponent disemboweled, the young girl fatherless, and the witnesses at the depot speechless.
Upon returning to camp, the first thing Serena does to establish her own ruthless authority is to size up a nearby cane ash and make a public bet with the skeptical cutting-crew foreman as to the total board feet the tree will yield. Unfortunately for the foreman, he takes Serena's bet. When the tree is cut and timbered and the results publicly revealed, his fateful bet loses him not only two weeks' pay, but also his job--leaving no doubt among his fellow timber men as to who is in charge.
From that day forward, woe to any partners, employees, lawmen, or doctors who dare to desert, mislead, or challenge the rising Pemberton dynasty. Serena, as a sideline to her day job of overseeing the cutting and transport of timber, proceeds to import and tame a wild eagle, teaching it to hunt and destroy the area's deadly timber rattlers, launching its aerial attacks from an imposing perch atop Serena's forearm, while she sits astride her white Arabian stallion. When the eagle drops one of its victims, and a six-foot venomous snake falls from the sky, landing at the feet of the camp's preacher, the man goes mad and is removed from his position, attracting unsavory interest and speculation from his fellow workers for months to follow.
The story of the Pembertons' rise to power takes an even more violent turn when Serena--who wears jodhpurs and boots like a man--becomes pregnant, carries to term, then tragically loses the child, as well as her ability to conceive any future children; on the surface she copes, but underneath it all her vengeful and vindictive tendencies thrive.
When Serena's quick tourniquet saves the life of a loner/worker whose hand is accidentally severed, she wins the blind loyalty of both him and his mantic mother, gaining a devoted henchman to do her diabolical bidding. Twenty-six months after the honeymoon train ride from Boston, Serena sets out to kill the child her husband fathered before they met. Her first foray into the surrounding hills fails to reveal the child's whereabouts, but Serena manages to carry out her first longed-for murder: the innocent Widow Jenkins who had been caretaker of the boy. "We've both killed now," Serena tells her husband urgently. "What you felt at the depot, I've felt, too. We're closer, Pemberton, closer than we've ever been before." And for the first time, we get a glimpse of the Lady Macbeth she has become, and the latent tendency that had been there all along. After her sinister pronouncement, her husband muses thusly:
"Madness, Pemberton thought, and remembered the first evening back in Boston, the walk down the cobbled streets to Serena's lodging, the hollow sound of their footsteps. He remembered the moment he'd stood on the icy step as Serena unlocked the door and went inside, pressed the front room light on. Even when Serena had turned and smiled, Pemberton had lingered. Some dim troubling, almost visceral, keeping him there on the step, in the cold, outside the door. He remembered how he'd pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his overcoat pocket, brushed some snow flurries off his shoulders as he delayed his entrance a few more moments. Then he'd stepped inside, stepping toward this room as well, into this moment."
When her latest obsession reveals itself ("just us" she says, passionately kissing Pemberton before setting out under cover of darkness) her husband's own desire to save the child who already bears such a striking resemblance to his father, initiates the slow unraveling of their marriage leading, ultimately and cataclysmically, to a conclusion so shocking that even though we sense it coming we think "no!" as we read--"no, surely not." But readers can rest assured, under Ron Rash's masterful pen and meticulous unfolding narrative, the dramatic conclusion is both thematically and cinematically right for the story. We arrive there breathless, incredulous, but strangely and supremely satisfied.
This is a finely crafted, beautifully rendered, and classically tragic tale of human ambition run amok. I have been a fan of Rash's work for years, but this surely is his best, most artful novel yet.
Book Review: Compelling Fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
Ron Rash's latest novel Serena, which was just released a few weeks ago, got me so hooked that I finished it in two days. Like his three other novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight, this one is another tour de force, blended with humor, crime, passion and tragedy. Rash further blends his imagination in this novel with a significant history of the Southern Appalachian region in its importance to the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
I have been watching a history channel series on the stories about the "Axe Man" in the Northwest timberland and the Empire of Timber Industry from the East Coast to the West Coast. When I saw the image--something like a river log pile or maybe a log jam--on this book's cover, I was intrigued. How would the novel titled Serena have anything to do with logging? Well, Rash brings them together through a characterization of Serena, a ruthless logging heiress, an anti-heroine, who is willing to use intimidation and murder to increase her and her husband's dominance of the North Carolina timber industry. A Faulknerian storyteller of the disappearing mountain culture, the displaced people, the buried places, and the lost past in the Appalachian region accompanied by love, family, violence, revenge and murder, Rash never disappoints his reader with new material. Serena's controlling manners and shrewd dealings simply kept me turning pages.
The story begins with a platform scene in Waynesville, North Carolina, where Pemberton's business partners Buchanan and Harris and some Boston Lumber Company's employees are waiting to welcome Pemberton's return and his new bride Serena's arrival. Aside from this crowd are a southern highlander Harmon and his pregnant daughter Rachel. The reader quickly learns the reason for Harmon carrying a knife (ready for a fight) and about Pemberton's unexpected marriage as he was in Boston taking care of his deceased father's business. At the onset, Rash reveals Serena's strong, assertive, and prideful presence from her provocation of Pemberton to kill Harmon, to the Pembertons' resistance to the national park project, and to a series of murders to remove those Serena finds against their interest. The novel reads like a Greek tragedy with furies spreading fear and vengeance over human fate. The concluding "coda" is striking as Rash generates catharsis through a display of frontier justice.
This novel of logging from Cove Creek Valley to Balsam Mountain and the Pembertons' opposition to the national park plan set after the crash of 1929 points to characters of excess, bred from an environment against the natural balance. The worst kind is unable to reflect or feel remorse, like Serena, disregarding the origin of life (trees of life also?) for self-interest. Living only for the present, Serena shows herself even keener on profit and on the dominance of the timberland than Pemberton. In contrast to his insidious protagonists, Rash gives us Rachel and Jacob, ("Horace") Kephart, and Sheriff McDowell as symbols of hope and the potential for heroism. The novel speaks to a universal theme of good vs. evil and the human struggle for justice and redemption--the best novel I have read thus far this year. Another amazement in Rash's fourth novel is the increasing lyrical quality of Rash's writing as if Rash the poet emerges behind Rash the novelist. I am looking forward to his next.
Book Review: Only A Few Yards Short Of Greatness
Summary: 4 Stars
I'd hoped this book would be the knockout American novel I'd been looking for--full of social content, great characters acting out a great story amid a magnificent scenic backdrop. Three out of four ain't bad.
The story is one of typical American enterprise, unleavened by responsibility. Rash--perhaps North Carolina's best writer in this decade--knows to exaggerate things to the limits of believability to make a point, and he does this with both character depictions and with the story these characters stir up. In a few words, his story is this: George Permberton has met and married Serena and they've in turn married their fortunes to the early twentieth century U.S.'s great southeastern timber resources. They are the infamous timber barons--subsequently their denuding of the southeast U.S. forests the reason why the federal government established national forests. But the Pembertons are more than careless with the land and forests. They are unprincipled to the max whenever something or somebody stands in their way. They fire sawyers to keep their fellow lumbermen intimidated. They kill anyone, even lawmen, who stand against their land-stripping. And, when Serena can't bear them an heir, they don't blink at attempting to kill an illegitimate son of George's, whom they feel may threaten their empire. Essentially this is a morality play, built loosely around the prototype of Macbeth.
For the most part, Rash does the story justice. Particularly near story's end, his story-telling is masterful in the way he plays out the Pembertons' self-destruction. And the manner in which Rash is able to immerse the reader in the U.S.'s 1920s culture and in the southeast's timbering processes bears witness to his ability to assimilate research and work it into his story. His prose seems a bit timid at first, as if he's unsure of how to append voice to story, i.e.: Should the narrator talk as do the mountain folk of Carolina and Tennessee, who people the Pembertons' timber empire? He gradually resolves these subtleties, and this initial mini-stumble hardly damages the book's overall impact. I've been told by another writer that I entrust too much of my work to narrative. Perhaps this is so, but I suspect it's a simple matter of taste--in both my reading and my writing.
That said, I must complain: In strategic places, Rash steps back from his central story to depict the still-magnificent forests of the southeast, and the looks and impacts of timbermen's denuding of the land. But his device for doing this is to rely on dialogue between several of the mountain folk, who attempt to describe these things indirectly to the reader. In my mind, this waters his dialogue in these segments. For my taste, this technique doesn't work as well as it should, for two reasons: * By nature, these folk are ineloquent and consequently understate the spectacle of both the forests and the timber scalping. * Such depiction has always been the work of narrative, and it would have better served his purpose here than such dialogue. Rash seems to want to appear conscious in this ambitious work of the birth of natural conservatism, both in the fight to establish the first national forests, and in the scenic and ecological impact of timbering the land. Were it not for his decision to depict such things via dialogue, Serena would have been all I'd hoped for--a work up there with the best of Steinbeck and Dos Passos.
Book Review: Serena: Mythological Villainess
Summary: 5 Stars
Serena is a book that has received accolades from many different reviewers and made several 2008 top ten lists. I was eager to read it and it did not disappoint! The first chapter hooks the reader. Pemberton and his new wife, Serena, arrive in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains and are greeted by a girl Pemberton unknowingly impregnated before he left. She is accompanied by her outraged father who is looking to Pemberton to make things right. The confrontation between them is sudden and brutal and sets the tone for the rest of the story. The story is mythical; the novel has been compared to a Greek tragedy and has been described as a "tall-tale" as well as a modern-day "Macbeth."
The title character, Serena, controls the entire novel. She causes the tension, the major conflicts, changes the landscape around her, and drives the plot to its inevitable ending. Serena is a cold, seemingly emotionless but beautiful woman who chooses for her husband a powerful timber baron who is absolutely besought with her and allows her to become his equal in his logging empire. His partners and employees have qualms about taking advice and orders from a woman. She soon proves their equal if not their better in the matters of production and logging expertise. She spends her days supervising the men on her Arabian horse, accompanied by an eagle she has tamed and trained to hunt rattlesnakes. Rash is not shy about using allegory and foreshadowing. Serena is as merciless and powerful as the eagle, and is a seasoned huntress.
The plot moves along briskly without surprises once we learn the extent Serena will go to make sure she gets what she wants. The Pembertons are fighting to save their land from those who wish to turn the region into a national park. The book takes place during the Great Depression where workers are riding boxcars across the country in hopes of gaining dangerous, backbreaking work as loggers. Rash continually writes chapters that include conversations from one particular team of loggers. Stories about Serena become legends among the highlanders who constitute the "chorus" of this simulated Greek tragedy. Rash even has Serena make mention of Fulvia, the wife of Mark Antony who helped her husband seek a bloody revenge against Cicero. Relaying the story to a writer in favor of the national park, Serena compares her own determination and ruthlessness to that of Fulvia's. The writer quips to Pemberton that he should be aware of how Antony died (in Cleopatra's arms, his intense love for her making him weak and vulnerable.) Serena despises weakness more than anything else. Therein, the ending of the book is neatly laid out for us.
This is a book steeped in both history and suspense. Rash has created a truly vicious antagonist. I think the Pembertons are meant to be types, successors to former mythological villains. Other characters in the novel are more consciously formed and exhibit a range of faults as well as virtues, are more human and therefore more sympathetic. The novel has characters to root for, but they are not the Pembertons.
An excellent book! I will certainly seek out others written by Rash. Recommended highly.
Book Review: "That's the only one of his you'll have."
Summary: 5 Stars
Rash has crafted a truly stunning novel, a clash of beauty and violence as ambition and greed run unchecked in the western North Carolina wilderness, where the mountains are rich with timber and men are desperate for work in 1929's depression economy. Against a pristine background systematically destroyed by an avaricious lumber company, the workers ply a dangerous trade where fatalities are frequent as a newly-married couple gobbles opportunity and uncut timber with insatiable urgency, leaving behind a scarred landscape. The Boston Lumber Company is thriving when George Pemberton and his new bride, Serena, step from a train in Waynesville, North Carolina, the Colorado-bred Serena primed for the next phase of her life in boots and pants, clearly not intimidated by the country or the fact that she is a woman. In fact, it is Serena's character that drives the narrative, a woman so ruthless that she astonishes the rough-hewn men of the camp with her first interaction.
Waiting at the station is an outraged, inebriated father, his clearly pregnant daughter at his side. When the angry Harmon challenges Pemberton for his daughter's honor, brandishing a knife, Serena encourages her new husband to "finish this now". Harmon soon vanquished, Serena coldly informs Rachel Harmon, "That's the only one of his you'll have." Embarking on their married life and business enterprises, the Pembertons are inseparable, George bending to his wife's will as she deals expediently with every challenge and anyone who opposes their goals. The rangy Mrs. Pemberton rides around camp, supervising the crews on her Arabian white stallion, a tethered eagle on a perch on the saddle, much like the gyrfalcons of medieval times. Indeed, Serena is like a Nordic goddess, intractable and determined. Soon the company name changes to the Pemberton Lumber Company. Awed by his wife's spirit and vision, Pemberton is a willing accomplice to even the most heinous of decisions, a study in rationalization in the name of love.
Rash's prose is filled with contrasts, the beauty of a wilderness daily destroyed, the Pembertons invincible with their money and powerful contacts, controlling anyone who would hamper their ambitions. The camp is peopled with eccentrics, men who endure daunting conditions, knowing that death stalks the careless as accidents erase one life after another. These laborers have an innate wisdom, watching the Pembertons, exchanging opinions of the fates of those who stand in opposition, simple men hoping to escape each new tract alive. For no one crosses these people without repercussions. After a tragic childbirth, when Serena learns she cannot have more children, she turns her wrath on Rachel Harmon and her baby, Jacob, the final obstacle. What ensues is harrowing, a penniless young woman desperate to escape Serena's vengeance, like a small, wild animal pursued by Serena's raptor. This is the territory of nightmares, but Rash is no nihilist, drawing his reader into that hopeful state where- occasionally- good does triumph over evil. Luan Gaines/2008.