Home Call (review)

Bob Sloan. Home Call Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2004. 205 pages. Paperback, novel. $15.00. Readers who were hooked by Bob Sloan's simple, organic style and the poetry of his prose in the short story collection "Bearskin to Holly Fork: Stories from Appalachia" will appreciate another side of the writer in his novel, Home Call. The mood and flow of his short stories, replete with detail, makes you want to read slowly and savor every line and page, content to be carried to the story's conclusion. In the novel, you have the same complex, introspective narrative, but the book is truly a "page turner" as you get to know Jesse Surratt and are pulled into the world of this solitary single man who returned to a family farm after a trauma in his youth but soon found that running away had neither lifted the pain nor resolved his old wounds. Jesse Surratt left home when he was 17 to join the Navy and see the world. The reader learns early on that he did so after the comfort and safety he felt in his small town were destroyed by a trusted mentor. A victim of sexual assault, he escaped and put healing on hold while exposing himself to the danger of another kind in war. He returned at the age of forty a changed man, a big man who kept others at bay with his size and surly disposition, who looked to avoid more fighting, afraid of an anger and rage that had never really dissipated. For many years after his return, Jesse Surratt kept to himself with his animals on the forty acres where his father had farmed tobacco. His need for human contact showed little to others, perhaps only to his series of wives over the next sixteen years, women he bed, wed and ultimately divorced. Margaret, his third wife and the woman he truly loved, remains a friend throughout the story, appearing as both refuge and conscience. She encourages Jesse to let the man he is inside come through, without fear, and the reader suspects she either knows him a little better than he knows himself or if not, she's prepared to tell him she does, which he tolerates time and again, perhaps because he suspects she may be right. Living in seclusion at the age of 56, farming tobacco on his land and jousting with a cantankerous old mule whose surly disposition is oddly agreeable, Jesse seems to have resigned himself to ending his days alone, until the mosaic of life shifts and his peaceful, predictable existence is irrevocably shattered—or more precisely, shattered again, in a painful and wholly different way. As the tale unfurls, the dark side of Hawkes County is exposed when a young black woman's assault 91 and attempted murder on Surratt's land lead him to discover a drug operation that has infused his home town with corruption stretching beyond his, or anyone's, imaginings. This book is not only a great read with an intricate plot, but it tackles in a quiet yet powerful way the stereotypes of the solitary Mountain Man, the small-minded, racist Southerner, and the "ignorant redneck," replacing them with real-life, multidimensional characters. Jesse Surratt is painted by Sloan as intense, contemplative and openminded , simultaneously a traditionalist and a modernist, a rich product of his Appalachian heritage, but someone who isn't limited by it. His trauma, a sexual assault by another man, is dealt with in a true, dignified manner without bawdiness. This disturbing part of his past leads him to run from a community he fears has branded him and where he suffers deliberate reminders of the abuse, only to find that he may have unwittingly branded his community, in turn. When he vows to deal with his plight—not, at first, eagerly, but after much internal debate—he's doing it for himself, for the young woman he has come to protect, and for his home town, as well as his whole sense of Tightness with the world. He faces the hardest of tests as he struggles to believe again that good is possible in a world gone...