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Nothing Gold Can Stay

July 2013

  • David Sornig

Ron Rash / Text Publishing




Ron Rash’s fiction doesn’t ever really stray far from familiar places: the geography, linguistic rhythms and history of the Appalachian Mountains are glimpsed here again in his latest collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay, through the narrow lens of the short story.

While Rash’s geography is limited, his stories suggest a microcosmic version of universal experience. The stories are populated by characters who struggle with hurt and mistrust, who are bewildered by their own and others’ stupidity and ignorance, but just the same they are graced by unexpected forgiveness, by love and some kind of karmic justice.

While the collection is sectioned off into three formal parts, suggesting there might be an underlying dramatic structure, there aren’t any sore-thumb clues pointing to what that drama’s logic might be. The real drama is in the stories themselves. Rash is a master at imagining dread in the midst of the real.

Those who come from outside in this part of the world are treated with sometimes justifiable scorn and suspicion. In ‘The Magic Bus’ it’s the 60s and sixteen-year old farm girl Sabra is tempted toward the false dream-life of a couple of passing hippies, and in ‘A Servant of History’ Wilson, a representative of the English Folk Dance and Ballad Society, makes the dire mistake of wallowing in his painfully hilarious fantasy of the region as a dead archaeological site. When Wilson asks his guide his name, the man answers ‘I a go ba rafe.’ Wilson hears this as Iago Barafe, hearing only the literary romanticism he wants to hear.

Rash’s thesis over and again is that it’s folly to presume that all you need to know is only what you think you know.

While outsiders have a tough time getting out, it’s no easier for the insiders. ‘The Trusty’ tries to make off from a prison chain gang with the aid of a seemingly guileless young bride, and in ‘Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven,’ Jody tries to rescue his once once-golden girlfriend Lauren from the meth house she’s tangled in.

What people most want to escape is poverty, the drudgery of the everyday. For more than one character the hope is for financial aid to get out into college, but even that might not be enough. Everyone wants some change of fortune, some passage into a more complete life, and some find it in unexpected ways. ‘Cherokee’ teeters through gamblers luck and ‘Something Rich and Strange’ swallows its dread whole when a girl drowns and the diver sent down to recover her body finds a kind of beauty in it that he wants to preserve.

Even when he is at his most gothic, as in ‘The Dowry’, with its jaw-dropping sacrificial gesture of Civil War reconciliation, Rash sits firmly in the realist camp. But for all that, there’s never any doubt that these are people cut from words, who live in the situational drama of story. The only thing Rash might be accused of is being over-earnest in his working at authenticity.

textpublishing.com.au

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