Above the Waterfall: A Book Review

Back in the old days of Virginia living, I attended a conference where I listened to my favorite Appalachian writers.  Lee Smith.  Sharyn McCrumb.

Then I found myself in a room listening to a new-to-me writer.

Ron Rash.

And I liked him right away.

He was a South Carolina man then but his words were pure home to me.  Heavy on the Wendell Berry side with the land as a character in its own right.

I think that was at least twelve, maybe more, years ago.

I’ve read all of his novels – One Foot in Eden, Saints in the River, The World Made Straight, The Cove, Serena.  (And I typed them out there in the order of my favorites.)

I saw an advertisement a month or more ago for a local bookstore.  Ron Rash was promoting his newest book – Above the Waterfall – and he was reading from it there at the bookstore.

Jane and I attended together.  (It’s so nice to have company on such outings – isn’t it?)

It was a great evening.  And I like Ron Rash even more after listening to him speak and watching his wife in the audience listening too and just seeing a taste and a touch of the kind of poet and writer and thinker and human he is.

Above the Waterfall is set in my favorite location – the Appalachian mountains.  It’s a book about two people in particular and it is written in their two distinct voices in alternating chapters.

The story is compelling and difficult and beautiful and bitter and I don’t actually want to say too much because I really think you should read this book, which is a nice change of pace since I feel as if my recent book review reads have been underwhelming.

HIs words fall off the page like poetry.  I am so attached to novels with a sense of wonder for words and language.  I like writing that reads like a poem.  To compare Rash’s writing style to Wendell Berry’s is bold for me, but I think it is deserved.  They are writers knit of the same cloth.

I particularly liked the sermon Rash has one characters deliver about nature providing an opportunity for us to touch the hem of the robe of glory of God and how just that touch can be enough to sustain us at times.

Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation.  But the good Lord knows we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do.  Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom.  Every time you see such it’s the hem of the robe of glory.

And of course, because of the light and the dark that’s in this novel and in this world and in each of us, you only read a few more paragraphs before a character reminds us of the bitter truth paired beside the beautiful truth.

You can see heaven all around us, Preacher Waldrop claimed.  But Mist Creek Valley would soon confirm that the same is true of hell.

This novel introduced me to a few new words.  One is “a gracious plenty”.  That’s a phrase I think is fitting to so much and so sweet in its old-fashioned rhythm.

In his talk at the book store, Rash mentioned that he sometimes will get stuck on a word.  He will get attached to one word and just know that he has to find a home in one of his works for that word.

I think I want ” a gracious plenty” to be a word that finds its way into my thoughts and my writing.

A word he mentioned the evening of his talk that stuck to him was murmuration.

As soon as he shared murmuration’s definition, I knew that word would be a nugget I would share with my son as soon as I got home.

You know when you see a flock of starlings overtaking a field?  So many that they litter the field with dark spots and when they rise up and burst into flight you can hear them?

That’s murmuration.

What a vivid word – right?  (And of course you know my bird-loving boy would love that word.)

In the novel,  the character calls the word murmuration ornithology’s word poem.  Well, now – if that ain’t the prettiest explanation for a word, I don’t know what is.

At a breakfast just last week, a flock of birds lit up the sky as we watched through the window.

I heard Bergen quietly breathe-talk: murmuration.