Pickering’s Mountain by Joseph Anthony (review)

Joseph Anthony’s second Appalachian novel, Pickering’s Mountain, set in present-day Eastern Kentucky, depicts the central dilemma of the Appalachian coalfields—the only good jobs are the ones destroying not only the rich mountain culture but the very mountains themselves. Sam Weatherby and his wife, Margery, have come to the mountains from New York City in quest of a simpler life and a job for Sam on the local newspaper. They soon meet Alma Pickering, the estranged wife of the Reverend Joshua Pickering, and Alma takes in Sam and Margery and their two children. But the mountains offer nothing like the simple life they imagined, as they’re drawn into battles over school Bible readings and mountaintop removal and family quarrels generations old. They become two more civilians caught in the crossfire of the Pickerings’ marital struggle.

Rugged mountains sometimes aggravate conflicts within and between families. But the opening of the Appalachians to coal mining a hundred years ago produced a different kind of war between miners and the mineral owners living far from the dust and silt, as played out in the rise and decline of the United Mine Workers. Today’s conflict is both greater and smaller–greater, in that technology has swelled earth-moving power to god-like abilities capable of reversing the ancient upheaval that gave birth to the mountains–but smaller as well because all coalfield residents are forced to consider anew their relationship to the hillside soil that fed their family for generations. This is the engine driving Anthony’s book. Nostalgia has no survival value; how hard should residents fight to keep the mountains, “their” mountains, when doing so keeps bread off their table, shoes from their children’s feet? Coal is money; there’s no way around it, and the only way through it is with immense machinery.

This conflict plays out most directly between Alma and Joshua Pickering, on the little land they own, but such sudden (in geologic terms) technological changes reverberate through their town with the force of a slow earthquake, as old ideas of community are shoved and compressed and inverted. Alma becomes a plaintiff in a case involving the time-honored tradition of Bible ladies in public schools, the first volley in a larger battle, described by Anthony in a long, tour de force section plaiting the voices of Mr. Frost from the ACLU, a sweet-smelling and devout Bible lady, and the Reverend Pickering himself, in terribly believable hellfire mode.

The Reverend Joshua Pickering, in retaliation against Alma, brings the fullness of his faith and his worldliness—after all, in addition to his ministry he’s a locally famous seducer–against his wife, with their mountain as the Solomonic baby. From Anthony’s skillful interweaving of the many narrative voices and styles, from diary to newspaper excerpt to first-person, we know the center won’t hold, as Alma and their grown children are forced to take various sides. Some of their kids find work carving away at the very elevation from which their families look down at them.

Sam’s job on the local newspaper gives him first go at telling the story of the mountain. The editor of the newspaper, Billy, uses him as a front in his fight against mountaintop removal. His articles and Billy’s stir the ire of powerful economic forces, not just the newspaper’s corporate owners but local people as well, those just trying to earn a living and resentful of anything that might leave them to the poverty that stalks the hills never far over the next ridge.

Joseph Anthony grew up in New Jersey, but taught at Hazard Community College for several years. That experience has provided him with a remarkable ear for mountain dialogue and religious expression, and he admirably refuses to treat any of his characters with less than the respect such complex individuals deserve. All of the players rouse and persuade the hometown crowd, and it’s a testament...