A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash (review)

Within the first few pages of Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home, the reader knows without a doubt that he is in the hands of a master storyteller. Mystery and intrigue leap off every page and engulf the reader’s attention, while some of the clearest, most provocative prose immediately glues the reader to the story Cash is judiciously unfolding. Here is a Greek Tragedy come to Appalachia, clearly, forcefully, and gracefully rendered through unforgettable characters and a situation more bizarre than something out of Flannery O’Connor. Cash’s treatment of place, however, is hardly a bare stage, but a presentation lovingly held in the imagination of a native son.

The characters are expertly drawn. From the clearly conflicted but courageous midwife Adelaide Lyle, to the naïve and tragic Jess Hall, to the outrageously evil Carson Chambliss who masks greed and depravity with arrogance and religiosity, Cash very confidently offers an array of characters that might be dismissed as grotesque if we did not recognize them as our own neighbors. Added to the previously mentioned characters are others who wrestle with deception and betrayal, guilt and inaction, fear and loathing. In less capable hands, these characters may not have lifted above the grotesque, but the author’s skill with rendering them makes them all too real. Further, the carnage and mayhem at the end of the novel is superbly plotted and solidifies the tragic ending without resorting to merely gratuitous violence.

In exploring his fictional reality, Cash exhibits great courage indeed. The town of Marshall belongs to a string of mountainous counties in Western North Carolina that hug the Tennessee line. These often remote communities are notoriously closed to outsiders and are insistent upon their own moral and legal codes. For Cash, an insider, to offer entry into these communities takes a lot of courage indeed, especially when congregants of a snake-handling religious sect are put on display, and while those who are “mostly good” are not sure how to respond. The conflict is heightened by cloaking the action with the natural beauty of the “hills and hollers” of Appalachia.

In my estimation, a certain “tragic beauty” best characterizes A Land More Kind Than Home, paradoxical though it is. And I suppose that Jess, while the most beautifully innocent of Cash’s characters, is also the most enduringly tragic of all because he has to live his life with what he has seen and knows, as well as with what he could have done and wished he had. That he could not save his brother is burden enough, but that he stands to lose himself is perhaps worse. Similarly, Miss Lyle, Sheriff Barefield, and Ben Hall all have their crosses to bear, but they have lived their lives and made their choices. Jess, we hope, still has room to grow and change.

A Land More Kind Than Home is a veritable tour de force and joins a long line of remarkable first novels. Wiley Cash combines a rare talent with superb training and has delivered what I expect will be the first of many great works.