On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

Comments on this board should be written with the assumption that readers have finished the book. If you haven't finished and don't want any spoilers, you may want to wait before reading these posts.

This was the first David Joy I read a couple of years ago after randomly finding it on Goodreads. A beautifully written novel about characters struggling with the past and present. This book highlighted an area of the United States I was not familiar with and have since read several books set in this area.

This read posed an interesting problem for me. There is no question about the abilities of the writer. It does trouble me a little that so much is written in a tradition that also favors negative stereotypes and can be a bit exploitative. I lived in NE Tennessee and am familiar with the many real life examples; I also know this tradition is entertaining to read and there is a big market for it. But like we saw with our God's Little Acre read, at times it can be too much. Obviously I am not singling out Joy nor is he a major offender. I just feel we should give it a thought every now and then when reading this type of fiction.

I was a little conflicted about this book 30 pages from the end, but the ending cemented everything I was ambivalent about. I still gave it 4 stars (maybe 3.5 if there were half stars). The writing is excellent, no doubt about that! But I am not sure about the book thematically - much in the book was wonderfully done, but other parts left me a bit cold.

I'll post more later about the many things I liked about the book. There's a lot of good to say about it, the author's empathy for the main characters that never lapses into sentimentality, the gripping events, many other aspects . . . but the ending really encapsulates an aspect I didn't like. With the ending fresh in my mind, I want to post about that first.

The last thirty pages in bothered me. So, Aiden feels great about killing the rapist because murdering him would "prick a pinhole in the darkness." He feels great to kill the bad guy. And yet he keeps him alive, torturing him basically, so that he doesn't feel lonely. ("But not yet . . . He was not ready to be alone.")

So basically, Aiden has learned nothing from all the experiences that have come before.

I would've been happier ending it on Thad's suicide. At least that was a complex psychological and philosophical moment:

Thad felt momentarily forgiven after the pastor's prayer, but he found that he just could not pay the price necessary for that redemption. In the end, he can't really believe he can be redeemed. He's trapped by his own guilt, and he sees no point in living further, as he will eventually meet "judgement". This predicament really touched me. It's a profound conflict of human tendencies, and I believed it. It's so hard to forgive oneself; downward spirals are so easy to surrender to. And it's so hard for some who has not experienced much human love to believe in love, or in loving motivations really. Thad's experience has shaped his conception of God; it's sad, but it has the ring of truth.

But these last chapters with Aiden . . . . I don't know. I wanted more from him, if not in action then in intent or thoughts or something. At least something more complicated than: I'll make the world better by taking out the bad guy, and I'll torture him for a while so I don't feel alone.

In the rest of the book, as screwed up as he was, he just seemed better than that. Aiden at the end of the book is smaller and simpler in intent than at the beginning.

I don't need a full-on turnaround or redemption. But I need at least something more than this.

For anyone who read this recently enough to remember the ending, I'm curious to hear how others felt about it. I get that the author didn't want to sugarcoat anything or give these characters an ending that he thought was unrealistic.

It just seems to me that Aiden's choice to murder this guy slowly in the way that he does at the end - it isn't going to result in anything psychologically healthy inside Aiden, to put it mildly. It feels like a big step backward to me.

But I also thought that the way that chapter was presented, it felt like the author didn't necessarily consider this a tragic ending for Aiden. It was presented relatively neutrally or even slightly positively portrayed until the final line; so it felt odd . . . as though the author's understanding of that chapter didn't match my own. That makes me uncomfortable because it seems to me that this event is going to bear a lot of very bad psychological fruit inside Aiden at a minimum. This murder feels self-destructive to me, but I'm not sure if Joy agrees.

I'm curious if others felt the same? Or maybe I'm just off base because the author and I are just at odds here in our understanding of these characters?

Sam wrote: "This read posed an interesting problem for me. There is no question about the abilities of the writer. It does trouble me a little that so much is written in a tradition that also favors negative s..."

I get what you mean Sam.

There's not a single undamaged character that's portrayed in this book. Aiden mentions a few times that most of the people in the area are "God fearing" and "hard working", but all of the characters that Joy portrays are drug addicts, drug pushers, crooks, or damaged/unstable. The one possible exception is the preacher, but he appears only very briefly near the end of the book.

A person who has never lived in North Carolina might be fairly terrified to enter the state if they went only by the descriptions in the book. I have never been to that Little Canada area, but I feel sure that most encounters in the area would not be as scary as the events of the book.

Joy is probably portraying a sub-section or underbelly of the area, which is a fair thing to do; I appreciate his giving a voice to people who are often ignored. But it definitely doesn't portray the full range of experience there. And when books like this are consumed primarily by those without knowledge of the area, the reading experience could be in danger of becoming sensationalistic and voyeuristic.