The Road from Gap Creek by Robert Morgan (review)

Robert Morgan’s best-selling novel Gap Creek (1999) ends as Julie and Hank Richards cross the North Carolina state line, returning to Green River after surviving flood, fire, and their first baby’s death in Gap Creek, South Carolina. Now readers can see how this poverty-stricken young couple’s lives play out. Their daughter Annie narrates this sequel as a married woman in the late 1940s. Her memories flow the way memories do, back and forth through time, from tragic days to lazy summer swims in the river, pulling us into an ordinary American family’s experiences during the Great Depression and World War II. In the plain, direct prose that we’ve come to expect from Morgan’s narrators, Annie tells a compelling story grounded in the historical realities of her place and time.

Those historical realities show the outside world’s infiltrating the Blue Ridge Mountains. Annie sees cars as thrilling, their power representing a “soaring into the future”. But other changes emblematic of her generation counter the delight of automobiles. Prohibition leads to bootlegging and killing. The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Depression bring hobo camps to a pasture gully and force the men of the family to leave home, once the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, to build military barracks at Fort Bragg, the only work they can find. The novel’s central event, Troy Richards’s death in a B-17 crash in East Anglia in 1943, begets enduring sorrow. These and other episodes, such as the typhoid epidemic or the traveling Raleigh Man’s peddling tonics and saddle soap from his panel truck, place readers squarely in the first part of America’s twentieth century.

Morgan ties history, of course, to character development, showing all the while that the complexities of the human heart remain his true subject. Julie’s silent grieving over the loss of her favorite son replays in Annie’s response to her mama’s death from a brain tumor two years later. For both women, these hurts are “too sad for tears”, and Annie, like her mama, uses work to survive such soul-rending experiences. This generational connection, a theme in all Morgan’s fiction, turns also on the cultural changes coming to the mountains. Annie’s dreams of a life beyond farm work and babies, of traveling or being an actress, remind readers that World War II expanded roles for women. Yet her ambivalence toward matrimony reflects the anxieties people in all times and places feel as they decide how to direct their lives.

Annie’s eventual marriage to the man she long resists reminds Morgan fans that The Road from Gap Creek is a sequel not only to Gap Creek but to other works as well. When Annie and Muir Powell elope, they merge the Gap Creek Richards family with the Powells of The Truest Pleasure (1995) and This Rock (2001). And readers of Morgan’s The Mountains Won’t Remember Us (1992) will recognize that novella’s narrator, Sharon, as an older version of Troy’s young fiancée in this latest novel. The Road from Gap Creek incorporates a number of these other narratives’ details, reinforcing Morgan’s intent to create a narrative cycle portraying the landscape and people of his native corner of North Carolina’s Henderson County.

Morgan gives the people in this part of his cycle a break from the constant calamity besetting Julie and Hank as they begin their marriage. The Road from Gap Creek balances tragedy and hardscrabble living with more cheerful scenes than we see in Gap Creek, many of them involving German shepherd Old Pat. The soothing natural world and supportive kindred also show characters the larger connections that give life meaning. Morgan models characters here, as he does in other works, on family: Annie on his mother; Troy on her brother Robert, killed in World War II; Julie and Hank on his maternal grandparents, to...