Long Man: A Novel by Amy Greene (review)

In her much-anticipated second novel Long Man, Amy Greene takes up the challenge of creating a fictional account of the removal of citizens from their homes by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the mid-1930s. No other cultural event affected so many lives in rural East Tennessee, which is the setting of Greene’s novel. The debate about the TVA remains unresolved after nearly eighty years, and recent incidents such as the coal ash spill of 2008 in Kingston, Tennessee, serve as reminders of the source of resistance to the institution. Was TVA a case of egregious government intrusion on private lives and private property, or was it a necessary sacrifice by some for the good of the many, a manageable consequence of progress for the common good? These issues are tangible in Greene’s novel, but such political questions are present without overwhelming her attention to the characters and their experiences, which make Long Man such a memorable piece of writing.

Though many compelling characters populate Long Man, the presence of Annie Clyde Dodson dominates the novel. She is an independent young woman who lives with her husband and small daughter on the farm she inherited from her deceased parents. TVA agents fear her, and neighbors—before they left the condemned town of Yuneetah—seemed mostly confounded by her. She is not friendly or charming, not witty or eloquent. She is more like a force of nature; solitary, mindful, and above all, powerful. Her independence is all the more remarkable given the time and place in which the novel is set, and in her role as a married woman at odds with her husband about their future.

The character who most balances the novel, and provides a kind of antithesis to Annie Clyde Dodson, is a drifter named Amos who was raised in Yuneetah and returns to find it almost completely empty. Amos’s motives are unclear from the beginning, just as Annie Clyde’s motives—to remain on her land so that her daughter may experience the beauty and freedom of that world—are perfectly clear. Amos is a man without articulate convictions, yet definitely drawn toward some unspoken goal in his trip back through the abandoned town of his youth. The new TVA dam, which has driven most everyone else away from the town, seems to have pulled Amos back toward it.

Greene very subtly introduces the major dramatic event of the novel with an intensely gripping scene in which Annie Clyde and James Dodson slowly realizes that their child, Gracie, has disappeared. Tension is built steadily as scene after scene shows the water rising in Yuneetah, with the Dodsons waiting until the last day to evacuate before it reaches dangerous levels. A real sense of panic instills the first pages of Gracie’s disappearance and the foggy and rainy nighttime search that ensues. Annie Clyde incriminates Amos, and some of the interesting secondary characters, like her difficult aunt, Silver Ledford—who leads an isolated life as a bootlegger higher up in the ridges above Yuneetah—begin to play important roles.

None of the characters in Long Man are exactly likeable in any conventional way, except the child Gracie and faithful hound Rusty. This presents another remarkable aspect of the book: Greene avoids sentimentality, without sacrificing sentiment. Long Man brings a world long past back into existence, and fills it with characters and situations that are as complex as the world today.

Certain readers will likely feel they have seen one too many lonely old granny women in mountain cabins who have a special “second sight,” or one too many beaten-down but good-hearted sheriffs in Appalachian fiction. Somewhere out there, an industrious graduate student surely is writing a dissertation called Conflicted Lawmen in American Fiction, and Greene’s Ellard Moody would deserve a chapter alongside Cormac McCarthy’s Ed Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men and Ron Rash’s Will Alexander from One...