Customer Reviews

Chemistry and Other Stories

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In "Chemistry and Other Stories," Ron Rash's most recent collection of short stories from Picador, Rash does exactly what Aristotle suggested to young writers over 2000 years ago; he starts his stories "in medias res"--"In the middle of things." Aristotle knew that if a story was to be successful, it had to focus on the main conflict immediately. Rash executes Aristotle's idea flawlessly in this fine collection.

"The spring my father spent three weeks at Broughton Hospital, he came back to my mother and me pale and disoriented, two pill bottles clutched in his right hand as we made our awkward reunion in the hospital lobby." So begins the title story of Rash's collection, "Chemistry." Rash drops the reader in the middle of things by cutting to the heart of the conflict in the first sentence. He follows "Chemistry" with "Last Rite." "When the sheriff stepped onto her porch, he carried his hat in his hands, so she knew Elijah was dead."

Lately, it seems, I have been lulled to sleep by recent fiction entries in some of the finest literary journals around, seasoned writers trying to entice me into their fictional web with weak beginnings dealing with nothing more challenging than weather reports, bird nests, and hammered metal bells. Rash, unlike many of his contemporaries, understands the structure of effective storytelling and how to imbue a tale with urgency. He starts so perfectly, it's hard to imagine the story could have begun anywhere else. Once the story's in full swing, Rash sketches in supporting events and background with the grace of a magician, so invisibly the reader will scarcely be aware he's doing it.

"I met Lee Ann McIntyre on a date suggested by my wife." From Rash's story, "Honesty." How can bird nests and metal bells possibly compete with that lead-in? Or the first sentence of, "Dangerous Love."--"When Ricky threw his knife and the blade tore my blouse and cut into flesh eight inches from my heart, it was certain as the blood trickling down my arm that something in our relationship had gone wrong." This is powerful writing and exquisite storytelling. Let's not forget, Rash is a poet. He knows about economy of language and writes like he's paying for each and every word out of his own pocket. John Gardner, author of "October Light, Mickelsson's Ghost," and many other titles, once remarked that every line of poetry should be "red meat." Rash obviously knows to stick to the main course, using words impeccably, and sparingly.

"When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after four months in Boston settling his father's estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a woman pregnant with Pemberton's child." From "Pemberton's Bride."

Rash's beginning sentences sweep the reader in like a riptide, and make compelling promises to his audience, which he delivers upon each and every time. These aren't tricks, or slight of pen; this is solid storytelling at its best. "After the second time his hardware store had been robbed, both times at night, Marshall Vaughn bought a pistol." That from "Deep Gap," and this from Rash's O. Henry Award winning short story, "Speckled Trout." --"Lanny came upon the marijuana plants while fishing Caney Creek." This, like many of the other beginnings in this collection, is simply elegant and astonishingly provocative. "Chemistry and Other Stories" is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable collections I've read in a long time, and could serve as a valuable primer for new writers and veterans alike, a poignant reminder of how powerful story beginnings can be.

A consummate writer, Rash's Appalachia assumes a reality few capture as brilliantly, whether in novels or short stories. Chemistry and Other Stories is a sampler of the characters who people Rash's novels, from the old and the new South, the intransigent past, the bloody fields of the Civil War never far from the intrusions of the present. As solid and unmoving as the landscape, those people possess a dignity and spirit unique to time and place, an unforgiving land where diligent souls coax forth meager crops, age sitting early on their faces. In the title story, "Chemistry", a boy learns that "sometimes you have to search for solutions in places where only the heart can go". Felled by a crushing depression, a man finds solace in a former hobby, scuba diving. And he returns to the Pentecostal religion of his youth. Watching his father cope with this unfamiliar burden, a son becomes intimate with understanding and compassion, then forgiveness as his father slips away in a watery grave.

Hard work defines each day for a young couple who have purchased their own home in "Blackberries in June". Toiling long hours to improve the place, project by project, Jaimie and Matt are sanguine about the many years of hard work ahead, a future they both believe in. A family tragedy requires an adjustment of those hopes- "You got to accept life is full of disappointments"- but this couple is forged from stronger stuff than those who seek to exploit their progress. Loss is as familiar as tragedy as memories of the dead haunt the protagonist in "Cold Harbor". Anna, a nurse, clings to the small comfort: The fate of a man who survives his near-fatal wounds in Korea, the possibilities of his future a balm to her recurring nightmares. Seeking the truth of this survivor's post-war existence, Anna learns that "some grief is like barbed wire that's wound around a tree". In fact, this exquisite tension of pain and relief is a hallmark of Rash's writing, an appreciation of the uneasy balance of life's weights and measures.

In "Dangerous Love", a young woman flirts with her attraction to a carnival knife thrower, the slippery fact of the couple's need to skirt the edge of danger defining the relationship. Escaping a predictable future, she leaves security behind, committed to a nightly testing of her lover's accuracy. Yet another kind of love is revealed in "Deep Gap". Uncomfortable in the drug-riddled world his son inhabits, Marshall Vaughn carries a gun when he confronts his boy and two others in a filthy apartment. After treatment, father and son hope for the best. But old habits eventually reassert themselves when there is little hope and scarce motivation. Unable to help his boy, Vaughn lays his own life on the line in a gesture of unconditional love. Whatever the time frame, scene or characters, Rash's Appalachia is a repository of wisdom, grace, stubbornness and survival, sometimes a bleak, unforgiving landscape, just as often the source of hope. This is no place for the faint of heart, the territory of saints and sinners, the grit of the American spirit writ large. Luan Gaines/ 2009.

It is impossible to read Chemistry and Other Stories, as I just did, without the floor slanting a little. At our house in riverside Ohio (sixty year old wood floors in most rooms; some carpet; a little bit of concrete in the room where we keep the upright piano), we've noticed an eight or nine degree tilt. At my in-laws' place, in Rowan County, Kentucky, only three degrees, but that's an old farmhouse my father-in-law built with his own hands, and it was already tilted a little.

I don't want to give too much away, not that it would ruin it for you, because it won't, but it might redact a tiny bit of the pleasure these stories have stored away for you, and why do that? Let me say, though, that "Pemberton's Bride," the second to last story, might be the only new story I've read this year that I kept living inside long after I turned the final page. It has all the perl and sweep of an epic novel packed into fewer pages than a New Yorker magazine article, and all this without skimping on scene-making or resorting to some kind of false summary resolution.

Worth noting, too, is the story "Speckled Trout," basis for Rash's novel The World Made Straight, set to a tune called down from eight clouds north.

There aren't many writers working who can spin a yarn or write a sentence worthy of the ones in this book. I'll here invoke Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station," Denis Johnson's story "Train Dreams," and Jim Harrison's "Legends of the Fall," not because the comparisons are just right, but because we'd be in adjacent neighborhoods, emotionally speaking, and because I think it might convince a few good readers to buy this book and be transported the way I just was. These stories are in my dreams, and it will be difficult, now, to separate the life I've lived in flesh and blood from the life I've just lived in ragged-bound trade paperback. That's not something you get to say too often after you read a regular old book.

Whether reading an entire novel, or a short story only 15 pages long, Mr. Rash has a wonderful talent for making you feel like you personally know the characters you're reading about, and that you're right there next to them in whatever it is they're getting themselves into.

As I've said many times before, I do NOT like short stories, and it's rare that I find a book of them that I can get through, but Mr. Rash has written just such a book. If you're at all interested in reading this, I definitely recommend it. I also recommend picking up any of his other novels...especially 'One Foot In Eden', which is one of my all time favorite books.

Mr. Rash has a great gift for storytelling, and you won't be disappointed by anything of his you pick up...and as usual, I look forward to whatever future novels he has coming.

Ron Rash writes stories about my native soil--western North Carolina--and Lord does he write them well. The Tuckaseegee winds through my memories of college like it winds through Cullowhee (Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes). I grew up hearing stories about a kid from Shelby that was better than Michael Jordan ever was and threw it all away for drugs (Overtime). Where I grew up, you knew the drug dealers, and you knew their daddies (Deep Gap).

The final question of Blackberries in June has kept me up late at nights. Chemistry, Last Rite, and Cold Harbor all address the (emotional) pain of death from a different perspective. Chemistry, Last Rite, and Blackberries in June are powerful looks at family. Not Waving But Drowning and Deep Gap expose the awfulness of that which you care most about slowly drifting form your grasp. Blackberries in June, Overtime, The Projectionist's Wife, and Deep Gap show a deep bitterness that runs through a downtrodden people. Honesty and Pemberton's wife over a window into the hatred and contempt with which outsiders view highlanders. Speckled Trout cuts deep.

Not every story is a homerun. Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes leaves no lasting impression. It took me three or four reads to properly place everyone in the emergency room at the beginning of Not Waving But Drowning. Dangerous Love is almost laughable. The Projectionist's Wife is a bit clumsy.

Pemberton's Bride, a long short story, was expanded by Rash into the standalone novel Serena. It doesn't really work as either, and the harsh view the main characters have of the people of Appalachia rankles even worse juxtaposed against stories told from their point of view.

This is still one heck of a collection of short stories, though, and I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in highland fiction. Rash is best known for his short stories, and this collection is one of his best: it was a finalist for the PEN/Falkner Award for Fiction and Speckled Trout won a 2005 O. Henry award.

Short stories included: Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes; Chemistry; Last Rite; Blackberries in June; Not Waving but Drowning; Overtime; Cold Harbor, Honesty, Dangerous Love, The Projectionist's Wife, Deep Gap, Pemberton's Bride, Speckled Trout.

While awaiting my copy of Rash's new novel Serena coming through Amazon Vine, I picked up Chemistry at my local Borders and ordered Rash's other works that were easily available (i.e. not for $75 for a used copy) through Amazon. As I read along, I thought that the stories were good, but not great. There's another Southern writer of enormous power, William Gay, whose novels and short stories are lyrical and dark--much like some of Cormac McCarthy's work, especially his dark and brooding Child of God. Gay took the title of one of his novels--Provinces of Night--from a sentence in Child of God. Then I read the last three stories in Chemistry, and here Rash makes a transition into a different and much more powerful writing style--a darker, lyrical flavor comparable to Gay or McCarthy.

Speckled Trout, the final short story, was later expanded into a full-length novel The World Made Straight, which luckily I should get in a day or two from Amazon. It's a strong, compelling work. The penultimate story, Pemberton's Bride, is the longest and best work in the collection, and this has been expanded into Serena, available in early October (unless you can get it through Vine). This story alone would be sufficient to bring the book up to 5 stars, even if the other tales rated only 3-4 stars each. A 46-page story is enriched into a 370-page novel. You cannot do that with most short stories--but here (not having read Serena yet) it seems perfectly natural and logical. Serena--Pemberton's new wife--joins her husband in his logging operation in the late 1920's in the mountains of western North Carolina. It's a rugged, brutal existence, and the Pembertons are both tougher and more brutal than the others. It's a dark, almost surrealistic tale.

For other books of short stories with a similar flavor, try Pollock's fine Knockemstiff, centered around Knockemstiff. KY, and also William Gay's lyrical I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down. Both of those books, like Chemistry, have short stories which are eminently suitable for expansion into full-length novels. All three books give you powerful character-driven tales, and all three are books that you'll find yourself looking forward to rereading.

Rash's Chemistry is that rare collection of short stories that I'll reread--again and again, like Hannah's Airships and Carver's What we Talk About when we Talk about Love.

As a resident of Western North Carolina, I have an affinity for stories that explore and examine the peoples and places of the region. But even if you care little about this area, you should read this collection. The language and characters are remarkable in strength and diversity--lovely and evocative.

I immediately bought Rash's novel, The World Made Straight, upon finishing Chemistry, and I'm now deep into that world. Thank you, Mr. Rash!

Ron Rash is a poet who also writes prose -- perfect ingredients for a "writer's writer" -- and I decided I would sample his short stories as a first course among his works. CHEMISTRY AND OTHER STORIES features stories mostly centered in the South, where down and out rural folk live out lives of quiet desperation. I've often used those words (Thoreau's) to describe Sherwood Anderson's collection, WINESBURG, OHIO, and its collection of grotesques. That term would work here, too. And as is the case with Anderson, Rash's grotesques are ones we care about.

Unlike Anderson's work, CHEMISTRY does not feature any common character. Instead, we have first-person point of view stories and third-person point of view stories -- sometimes with a male protagonist and sometimes with a female. The strongest of the lot are huddled at the end: "The Projectionist's Wife," about a boy in a deer stand who witnesses a drunken man's advances against a woman below; "Deep Gap," the tale of a father's desperate last attempts to save a son who is caught in the grasp of drug addiction; "Pemberton's Bride," a long, almost Gothic tale of a lumber magnate and his cold wife, who will stop at nothing -- and I do mean nothing -- to have her way; and "Speckled Trout," a cautionary tale about a boy who finds free pot growing out in the badlands while fishing one day. He learns nothing in life comes for free.

Some of the earlier stories are uneven, but overall, it's a great introduction to a capable author worthy of a larger audience. If you haven't already, you should be itching to sample some of Rash's work, whether it's his poetry, short stories, or novels.

This is an amazing, rich collection of short stories that seems to be a natural descendant of Flannery O'Connor - with a Southern Gothic flavor. My favorite story is "Their Ancient Glittering Eyes." Many of the stories deal with family relationships, as well as faith. It's a powerful collection that I highly recommend.

I'm honored to call Ron Rash my friend. And it's not because of that friendship that I say what I must about his collection, CHEMISTRY AND OTHER STORIES. He knows the Southern Appalachians like the back of his hand. And his way with the declarative sentence is astonishing. I'm not sure when I'll be able to separate my life from the lives of some of the characters in this book. "Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes" gave me chills up my spine, but it was when I'd finished "Pemberton's Bride" that I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I'd been in the presence of a master writer working at the height of his powers. (I've read that Ron has a new novel coming out in October of this year. It's called SERENA: A NOVEL and I have a feeling that Ron has fleshed out "Pemberton's Bride" as he did in the case of his third novel THE WORLD MADE STRAIGHT, enlarging the story "Speckled Trout" in this collection--a story which won a 2005 O. Henry Award--into that novel.) If ever there was a born writer, a person who has a genius for the written word, it's Ron Rash. I notice that he is now being compared to the great Southern writers of years past: Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor, and others. And I truly do not feel that is too much of a stretch. Ron is incredibly gifted and he has honed his skill to such a fine point that, reading his novels or these stories in CHEMISTRY, one finishes almost breathless, but wanting more. I await his forthcoming novel SERENA with bated breath. I could continue writing but I would only repeat myself. Ron Rash is an extraordinary writer. He ought to take every honor that's not nailed down. I cannot praise his work enough. If you have any interest in the work of Southern writers, especially writers whose turf is the Southern Appalachians, then by all means lay hands on one of Ron Rash's novels or this volume of short stories. I promise you that the reading experience they will give you will be one unlike almost every encounter with fiction you've had before. Bravo, Ron. Kudos! You are unquestionably the genuine article, the real thing. And I do not heap this praise simply because I count you as a friend. I say these things because they are true. I cannot say enough good things about you. Your talent looms large; it is immense; it contains multitudes.