Natch

by Darrell Kinsey

At the age of twenty-nine, tired of trying to get along with members of his crew and tired of the money going into somebody else’s pocket, Natch begins working for himself, climbing and cutting down trees in the foothills of north Georgia. He has his truck, ropes, climbing gear, and a rotating selection of secondhand saws he finds at pawn shops and flea markets. He is free to work as he pleases. And he believes he is fine with his life as it is, living alone in an old hunting cabin at the end of a dirt lane, enjoying his habits, exploring his vices, and living, as he puts it, “like some wild thing let loose on the world.”

Then he meets Asha, an alluring woman who works the night shift at a convenience store. He finds himself needing her in a way that he has never needed anyone before. Among her charms are her passions for reading and belly dancing and her ambition to put herself through school to become a therapist. She believes her studies will cure her of the familial dysfunctions she faced as a child and eventually enable her to help others.

When Asha discovers that she is expecting a child, the young couple struggles to convert the excitement of their early days together into a more steadfast companionship. Over the seasons of her pregnancy, Asha discovers that the freedom of their hardscrabble existence is overshadowed by the constant threat of misfortune and injury, and she finds herself timorous to bring a child into a setting where chainsaws are everywhere, where constant fires burn the bones of felled trees, a world of endless struggle in which finding more work means finding more danger.

Genres: Fiction

165 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2025

Reviews

[Katie Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characters and setting in Natch pull you in, with authentic descriptions of north Georgia places and characters. Asha’s and the narrator’s relationship feels like a familiar dynamic. I also loved the descriptions of treework and it was informative without dragging down the narrative. Very sweet, sad book, and the ending made me want to circle back to the beginning, now that I know the story.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

😮‍💨

🌳
“Natch”
Darrell Kinsey

“She looked like it’d taken her 100 years to get so young.”

A short debut novel with an immaculate sense of personhood, of a man among Georgia trees full of slow time, “Natch” is about how we participate and interfere and live our fast little lives chopping and cutting and moving among larger older beings while trying to be in love and learning to suffer and grieve. Natch is a beautiful book in the way of a gnarled and lonesome tree.

A little sexy, a little scary, a whole lot sad, Natch is humble in its tellings. The narrator is a man who cuts down trees to make a living: Not your typical TikTok content lumberjack per se: I honestly think he could put them to shame. This one does much in 160 or so short pages but at its heart: falling in love with a woman is like coming to know an old, old tree.

“It made me realize there were older versions of her hiding in the past, and other versions that might come out in the future.”

Don’t let this fool you, it’s just a subtle nudge of a metaphor. The book has a love story at its core, but as you peel away the layers, it’s also a story of grief and grieving.

Moreover, it is a detailed and intricate illustration of just how unequipped a man is for literally anything at all. Sure he can get good with chainsaws and ropes and levers and lines, but outside of the waffled boxes of hard knowledge, there are mysteries a simple man cannot know. Natch nails that. I felt it at my core.

Now, to try to sell you a bit: there’s, surprisingly, something very Ayşegül Savaş about this book. Something Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s like if Ron Rash had written a novella to be a Georgia woods counterpart to “Interpreter of Maladies.” It has that subtle, part-by-part soft telling of the real, right-in-front of you story that needs to be told. It’s unafraid of sorrow, of the deep end, of finding the profound in the every day without trying too hard or going too far.

The more I think about the book, the more I love it. I am so glad this came to my radar via the @center4fiction first novel prize list. I’ve never not found a new favorite by watching that prize.

[Afton Mortensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read, simple cadence, a supportive focus on small details that make connecting with the characters (even in such a fast, dry cadence) possible.

I read the interview with Iowa saying he wanted this to read like a “driveway story”, when workers take a break and stand around in the driveway swapping too personal of stories with relative strangers. It felt like a cold retelling in the way only a hard young man could do of a story this all around painful.

[Dee Vodicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisitely written with a heartbreaking story line of deep love and loss. Kinsey just won the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.

[Patrick Tierney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good debut and a quietly devastating character study.

[Aubrey Craft Jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreakingly beautiful.

[Karen Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up thinking about this book about a Georgia tree-cutter in different ways. It’s a love story, or, maybe more accurately, a love-and-loss-and-recovery story. It’s a story with lots of subtle characters: trees, for sure, and a saw, but also a truck and yellow sweatpants and a baby squirrel. It edges towards Southern Gothic. I was most drawn to scenes of Natch at work, which was brought to completion in the final pages.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.