The Bruise of Poetics

To open a book and discover both a compelling, well-told story and prose as fluid as you’ll enjoy in Alex Taylor’s The Marble Orchard, is a rare find, but not unheard of in literature, of course. Some similar examples come to mind, and they’re all, at least in the mind of this reviewer, more than a little flattering. Names like Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, and William Faulkner are easily invoked.

All this, and it’s a debut novel.

You heard me.

Taylor’s award-winning short story collection, The Name of the Nearest River (2010), was a good indication of what might follow, though. Taylor could not have written a better follow-up.

The Marble Orchard is the story of young Beam Sheetmire, a boy on the very edge of adulthood working a ferry boat with his family, who is thrown into a mired swirl of adrenaline-fueled discovery: about his family, himself, and history itself, as he had known it, until his final ferry passenger boards to cross the river.

As the narrative weaves itself to life, along with it come a host of characters somehow both familiar and alien to the Appalachian setting where Taylor has placed them. Characters run a wide spectrum throughout from a truck driving, suit-wearing sociopath to the more common (for the area) kingpin antagonist, to a sheriff named Elvis. Taylor does not waste the available options of people to include in his story. And once they’re in place, he quietly moves into the realm of a stylist to combine story, setting, and character in ways many others have yet to accomplish.

Taylor lays the foundation for the entire novel early in a prologue. The single sentence becomes prophetic by the novel’s conclusion. He writes in his first sentence, “Beam could believe all of it now.”

The first sentence opens without context, but leads into Beam Sheetmire, at a family reunion, thinking of how he had never really looked like many of his relatives.

In the following paragraph, Taylor expertly deals with this, though his prose, rich and beautiful and as lush as nearly any found lately, can flirt with those who might call purple prose. A section of this paragraph shows both Taylor’s fantastic ability as a prose stylist and the possible moment, which an impatient reader might take as an early sign to move along to the next book on the nightstand:

Standing beneath the sycamore tree in the warm shade as it spilled over the thick wind-loomed grass, he watched the rowed and white-clothed picnic tables steeped with dishes and casseroles deviled eggs, meats and gravies, baskets of rolls and cornbread wedges, bowls of soup beans, fried fish and fried turkey and fried deer tenderloin, the tables curving up the slight hill and beyond it to disappear into the old tobacco barn gone unroofed and useless these many decades before reemerging out of the barn’s rear door, the entire dinner swarmed by gnats and black flies that appeared like frenzied dust against the white haze of the sky.

And then you have Taylor’s command of narrative. The Kentucky-native spends a great deal of time exploring some familiar tropes present in many Appalachian and Southern novels—the strong pull of home and family, the generational disconnect, and the hardness of both men and women struggling to get by. But in the true sense of exploration, Taylor does so by the very definition of the word, turning over old stones to find fresh dirt and things moving newly beneath.

The often-depicted Appalachian kingpin in the case of The Marble Orchard, an aging man named Loat Duncan, is a perfect example of how Taylor turns the familiar into something new. In the scene in which we are introduced to Duncan, Taylor gives us just enough to know we’re in familiar territory, but offers just enough for the reader to expect things to be slightly off-center:

From his porch, Loat watched the cruiser slip under the awning...