Ron Rash: “In America we’re in such a dark place"
With his outstanding new work Above the Waterfall, the highly acclaimed US author Ron Rash tries to draw the 'wonder' from a snarling modern America. He talks about the novel here, and why while a proud Southern writer, don't precede that with 'just a'
It feels somehow relevant to reference our current year to a boxing match from back in 1973. With about half of it now gone, being alive in 2016 so far feels a lot like being Joe Frazier in the ring with George Foreman: we came into this thing all pumped up and feeling good but the bell had barely rung before we were getting pummelled from all angles, on our ass before we even knew what hit us and barely back up before we got pounded down again. Death has been stealing our cultural icons while atrocities have been exploding across the world. Doubling down on the terrible, the political response across the globe seems more and more inclined to fear as masses of people swing to the right and swarm to support leaders who dress ignorance up like strength.
Right now it’s a hard world to write from optimistically, while remaining grounded in reality. As a writer known for the violence and darkness of his work, Appalachian author Ron Rash probably wouldn’t have been the most obvious candidate for the task. His latest novel, Above the Waterfall, doesn’t skimp on the violence or try to skim over the horror of the modern world. Instead it looks it dead on and sees the beauty too, and the reasons to be hopeful, and lays them all down in simple spoken prose.
Split between two narrators, Above the Waterfall takes place in a small mountain town, awash with natural beauty but plagued by economic depression and drug problems. A retiring sheriff and a traumatised park ranger-cum-poet, the two heroes’ dual angles on the world offer a view both darkly pragmatic and lyrically hopeful. Each time a previous interview turned to his work in progress, Rash would always describe his latest novel as an attempt “to look at the world more hopefully.”
Now that it’s complete, his description remains the same, coming back continually to the word “wonder” time and again as the element of life he most hoped to capture. “I’ve noticed now that people don’t tend to use the word as a noun very often,” Rash claims, “but when I’m out in the woods I do feel wonder.” Such an earnest appreciation of the world might seem odd coming from an author whose novels are littered with death, destruction and drug abuse, but as he goes on to explain, these two seemingly discordant tones are harmonised in the overarching aim of his writing: “I’m trying to be true to the world. Much of my work deals with the darker aspects of it but I’m not gonna be true to the total experience of what it means to be alive in the world if I don’t acknowledge wonder. And beauty.”
The darkness of contemporary America
The world his writing inhabits, and the America in particular, is a very difficult one to write from hopefully. Rash makes no attempt to shy away from this fact, suggesting that “In America right now we’re in such a dark place, such a troubled place.” Gun violence and racial conflict have been the dominant narrative in the US this year, all underpinned by a deeply unsettling surge of support for a man even Bill O’Reilly thinks is a bigoted loudmouth. Rather than being backed down by the darkening times though, Rash believes they only make it “even more important to write about wonder,” bursting into an exasperated chuckle as he attests that “You don’t ignore that but…you can’t give up!”
That mixture of poetry and pain is typical of Southern writing, often taken as an extension of the landscape itself and the result of a life lived in close contact with the sublimity and savagery of nature. There’s an ancient, immovable quality to the mountains too that Rash sees as speaking to writers like himself and forefather of the Southern tradition William Faulkner, distinguishing them from other American writers: “When you read Faulkner, you get a sense of generations of people. When you read Hemingway, you don’t get that.” This sense of being grounded in history, of the past being still fiercely present, is imbued in Rash’s writing. With its slow-moving, soft-spoken style it feels like it understands the big picture, the smallness of any one moment however incredible or horrifying in the true scope of our collective history.
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Though he can be proudly placed into its literary heritage, Rash remains sceptical of attempts to label him as a “Southern writer”, grinning as he admits that he’s always afraid of it being preceded by a “just a.” Though his mountain home is deeply embedded in his prose, this sense of connection to the land is far more important to him than the specific land itself. When asked to name his literary idols, he rolls off the names of Americans, Russians, Frenchmen and even the odd Scottish poet: writers from across the globe with a shared ability to draw on the land and channel it into their prose. It’s possible that when you’re able to step back and see the full story unfolded, appreciate the human drama around you as just a fleeting moment in a much older, vaster world, that things don’t appear quite so doomed. Pantomime villains like Trump don’t loom nearly so large when reduced to their true perspective.
Writing for the screen
While the style and philosophy of his writing can be traced back through history, the desire to make things new is a constant motivator for a man who chose the term 'driven' when asked to describe himself in a single word. “I don’t want anyone to pick up one of my books and think ‘oh he’s just repeating himself’” says Rash, “I think I did something new with this novel.” Taking this desire to keep changing into the future, the question of writing for the screen seemed potentially like a natural next step for a man whose works have been adapted into feature films twice in recent years, most prominantly in 2014, when Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper took lead roles in Serena. Rash remained intentionally hands-off with those works and he makes it clear that his opinion hasn’t changed, comparing the idea of writing for the screen to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: a tortuous, drawn out process where “people just keep chopping away” until your beautiful catch is reduced to a ragged skeleton, its original quality now only visible to the most discerning eye. So that’s a no.
Having moved assuredly between novels, short stories and poetry already, the exact form he turns to next might not matter all that much. There’s always something hugely enjoyable when an author speaks like they’ve just walked out of one of their own stories, like you’re watching a part of the world they created slip off the page and into reality. When asked about his ambitions for the future, Rash replies in plainspoken Southern drawl: “I just want to write the best I can, as long as I can.”
A poet by nature, Rash’s method is to begin with an image that resonates and build a narrative from there. In Above the Waterfall, there’s a recurring image that really echoes: a natural landscape alive with greenery and growth, littered with the detritus of drug abuse. The novel never asks you to look away from one or focus on the other. Both exist, exactly as present and important. Instead it demands that you hold these conflicting sides of the world in mind simultaneously and experience the ying-yang of the human life in its fullness. The political world and the media around them might be a-buzz with people determined to emphasise only the reasons to fear, but novels like Above the Waterfall are a reminder that this is only half a picture, that to be hopeful is not the same as to be naïve. In whatever medium he chooses, so long as Rash continues to write as well as he is, then the future holds at least one thing to look towards hopefully.
Above the Waterfall is out now, published by Canongate, RRP £14.99