Understanding Ron Rash

Chapter 2 The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, Casualties, and Chemistry

Chapter 2 The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, Casualties, and Chemistry To readers most familiar with Ron Rash the novelist or poet, his extensive work in short fiction over the course of his career may come as a surprise. In fact two of Rash’s initial four books, including his first, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth (1994), and Casualties (2000), were collections of stories. Moreover his third such volume, Chemistry and Other Stories (2007), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, reprinted eight selections from Casualties—all revised in various ways—among its thirteen stories, a fact that went virtually unnoticed by reviewers of Chemistry but one that suggests the high level of Rash’s achievement in this genre as early as the late 1990s. It was, after all, the 1986 title story of his first collection that earned Rash the General Electric Younger Writer’s Award. About this genre Rash has said, “I just love short stories, and I love to write them. I think short stories are the hardest form to write—harder than poetry and harder than novels. There’s a concision such as there is in poetry. . . . Yet at the same time the reader has to feel the satisfaction of a novel, the sense of an arc, a conclusion, a whole experience being rendered.”1 As a short story writer, Rash generally produces traditional narratives, eschewing the fabulations of magic realism and the self-consciousness of metafiction as well as the vapid style and attenuated characterization of much of literary minimalism. His short fiction is richly detailed both in setting and characterization and presents a wide array of situations and types of people. It is also energized by thematic complexity and nuanced shadings of feeling that engage readers with the moral and emotional challenges his characters confront. Rash’s prose style is usually simple and direct, with few of the baroque rhetorical flourishes that mark Faulkner’s fiction or that 8 Understanding ron rash of Cormac McCarthy, despite Rash’s admiration for both authors. “I try to write as clean a sentence as I can,” he says. “I hope the reader senses a lyricism there but one that is also taut.”2 Stylistically, then, Rash is closer to Ernest Hemingway than to Faulkner, and he relies on dramatic incidents and the emotions inherent in them to insure reader involvement. Another impressive trait of his short stories is their use of widely varied points of view, both first and third person, including an assortment of female as well as male first-person narrators. States Rash, “I like that challenge of entering a sensibility different from my own. I’m really not much interested in writers who limit themselves to a single sensibility. The trait I prize is the one that Keats prized in Shakespeare: negative capability. That, to me, is the greatest literary artistry, where you can be anyone, anything.”3 While Rash is known for grounding his fiction and poetry in Appalachia, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Other Stories from Cliffside, North Carolina is set in a small piedmont community with only one stoplight , a town dominated economically by a cotton mill but also home to a junior college. Cliffside (an actual town of that name is located a few miles from Boiling Springs) thus combines features of the author’s birthplace in Chester, South Carolina, with those of the town in which he grew up. The name Cliffside suggests the precariousness of the town’s situation, its liability to topple or slip, a trait consistent with Rash’s conception of human nature and with the theological observation made by Tracy, one of the book’s three first-person narrators, that “it’s a fallen world,” a phrase repeated twice more in the volume’s title story.4 A cliff, of course, is also an apt place from which to make a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, and as the collection’s title indicates, religious concerns are an important subject for Rash, here and throughout his career. But equally important is a more general experience of change and loss, evident in the book’s brief italicized opening section, which reports the destruction by fire of Greene’s Café, now “nothing but smoke and ashes” (1). The burning of this restaurant, a business mentioned more than a dozen times in the ten stories that compose the book, comes to represent the increasing erosion of small-town communities and their...