Saints at the River
By Ron Rash
HENRY HOLT; 256 PAGES $24
Leave it to a novelist to examine the secrets and hidden motives bubbling to the surface when an award-winning reporter chases after a story. The inevitable and lasting influence of media coverage on events is just one of the many underlying themes in Ron Rash's ambitious second novel, "Saints at the River."
At the start, an Easter-break picnic turns suddenly tragic when an inquisitive 12-year-old daughter of well-to-do Minnesota parents wades into the Tamassee River and drowns in the swift-running water, her body trapped under a big rock in a deep eddy. The death ignites a heated ecological dispute in the river's namesake rural community of Tamassee, S.C. The girl's brokenhearted parents want to have a temporary dam installed in order to recover their daughter's body. But the town's environmentalists argue that tampering with the river's flow violates the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in the federally protected Tamassee, "the last free-flowing river in the state."
Assigned to cover the story is the novel's 28-year-old narrator, Maggie Glenn, a Tamassee native and a fledgling photographer for a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina's state capitol. Maggie's boss figures she can "translate mountain speech into standard English." Although she bristles at the insult, the romantically unattached Maggie nevertheless jumps at the chance for some alone time with Allen Hemphill, the pensive new reporter with secrets of his own.
Rash, a professor of Appalachian studies at Western Carolina University and author of a previous novel, "One Foot in Eden," packs this one with back stories. Indeed, many of these long-suffering characters are stuck in the past. Take Maggie. Although seemingly possessed of an uncomplicated nature, Maggie's blood boils whenever her thoughts stray to her sick, widowed father and his role in an accident that left her younger brother disfigured. Also, Luke, the Tamassee's dogged environmental gadfly and chief opponent of the temporary dam, broke Maggie's heart during her summer break from college when she was 21, leaving her emotionally damaged. "I didn't realize that someone could take your love but not necessarily love you back," Maggie tells Allen. Allen, too, has suffered a nearly unbearable loss, making it difficult for him to cover the Tamassee dispute objectively or heartily embrace his deepening feelings for Maggie.
The excessively melodramatic back stories and conventional romantic plot twists interfere with the pleasure of reading this often riveting and always intelligently nuanced environmental tale. At first glance, solving the dilemma facing the community of Tamassee appears simple enough. Just erect the temporary dam and recover the girl's body. The benefits are obvious: The grieving parents, politicians, the town's civic-minded inhabitants can resume their normal lives.
But at a town meeting, Luke insists that messing with the river would set an undesirable precedent. "It would open up the Tamassee for all kind of damage," says Luke, who has dedicated his life to protecting the river. Another citizen cautions that the untested temporary dam might fail and endanger the lives of the rescuers.
"A white water river's not like any other. Things that work on a flatland river won't work on the Tamassee." But in response, the dead girl's father draws a line in the sand: "Maybe you hillbillies don't know nearly as much about the river as you think."
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the standoff between the community and strangers is bridged by what Allen and Maggie's choose to divulge and what they leave out. Allen's touching front-page story alongside Maggie's photo of the grieving father staring into his daughter's watery grave galvanizes statewide support for the temporary dam. But we readers know that the emotional content of the set-up photo is somewhat suspect. We also know that tragic events in Allen's past make him naturally sympathetic to the dead girl's family's demands. In this way Rash depicts the obvious: The possibility of objectivity when reporting the news is a fiction we all pretend to believe.
All the parties share responsibility for the unexpected yet haunting events that follow. Or do they? The resolution of the plot leaves more questions than answers.
Rash is a thoughtful novelist exploring serious concerns about the environment, the power of the media and the limitations of law when it comes to anticipating and settling complex problems. The fictional exploration of these significant yet commonplace issues that small and large communities grapple with every day are likely to resonate far more with readers than another whiny yarn about the predictably dysfunctional comings and goings of the wealthy and the Botoxed.
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