Requiem by Fire: A Novel [Hardcover]

Wayne Caldwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 23, 2010

Charles Frazier called Cataloochee, Wayne Caldwell’s acclaimed debut, “a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America.” Now, in Requiem by Fire, Caldwell returns to the same fertile Appalachian ground that provided the setting for his first novel, recalling a singular time in American history when the greater good may not have been best for everyone.

    In the late 1920s, Cataloochee, North Carolina, a settlement tucked deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, is home to nearly eleven hundred souls—many of them prosperous farmers whose ancestors broke the first furrows a century earlier. Now attorney Oliver Babcock, Jr., has been given the difficult task of presenting the locals with two options: sell their land to the federal government for the creation of a national park or remain behind at their own financial peril. 

    While some of the area’s inhabitants seem ready to embrace a new and modern life, others, deeply embedded in their rural ways, are resistant. Silas Wright’s cantankerous unwillingness to sell or to follow the new rules leads to some knotty and often amusing predicaments. Jim Hawkins, hired by the Parks commission, has relocated his reluctant wife, Nell, and their children to Cataloochee, but Nell’s unhappiness forces Jim to make a dire choice between his roots and his family. And a sinister force is at work in the form of the deranged Willie McPeters, who threatens those who have decided to stay put.

    Requiem by Fire is a moving, timeless tale of survival and change. With humor and pathos, this magnificent novel transports readers to another time and place—and celebrates Southern storytelling at its finest.
 
 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Caldwell follows up the well-received Cataloochee with this homespun effort about a close-knit mountain village's fight to keep the land its inhabitants have spent their lives cultivating. In 1928, the residents of Cataloochee, N.C., are given an ultimatum by the National Parks Commission to either resign their farmland for a price, or remain, but have their property leased back to them by the government. At the core of this conflict is Silas Wright, a farmer who locks horns with the Parks Commission, disputes both of the options offered, and refuses to succumb to governmental demands. Attorney Oliver Babcock is also making rounds about town securing agreements to negotiate as well. Wright contemplates a lawsuit against the commission, for which longtime resident Jim Hawkins is now enlisted to be a warden of the park to come. Mild melodrama ensues as the government removes residents from their homes, a mysterious death occurs, Hawkins contends with an unhappy family, and the town fire-starter gets up to his old tricks again. As in his debut, Caldwell again attributes rich historical background to a dizzying array of colorful, authentic Southern characters in an unhurried story about resiliency and the unifying power of community. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Caldwell’s outstanding debut novel, Cataloochee (2007) followed several generations of hardscrabble folk living in the Great Smoky Mountains, warmly describing them tending to pristine stretches of land, keeping a wary eye on outsiders, and creating a tangled forest of intermingling family trees. The book ends in 1928 with the resolution of a patricide and the impending transition of the land to the Smoky Mountains National Park. This book, then, follows those who choose to stay and live out their days on the family land, or move out and try to adapt elsewhere. With little central plot, the chapters instead form a collection of funny, wise, and raw vignettes that range from touching (a matron who talks to her dead husband to alleviate the pain of leaving her home) to uncomfortable (a near-feral deviant who draws sexual gratification from setting things on fire). Caldwell’s impeccable synthesis of setting and era, and especially his deft hand at crafting the rhythms of speech, can’t be entirely attributed to meticulous research. These stories are in his bones. --Ian Chipman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 23, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063442
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063444
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wayne Caldwell is a native of Asheville, North Carolina. He began writing fiction when he turned fifty. Winner of two short story prizes and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association, he is the author of two novels---Cataloochee (2007) and Requiem by Fire (2010), both published by Random House. He is finishing work on a third novel. He lives in Candler, North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Requiem Captures the Soul of the Mountains, March 31, 2010

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Belize Traveller (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Requiem by Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

In his second novel, Requiem by Fire, Asheville native Wayne Caldwell continues to plough and sow and carve and create his own literary landscape, in the way that Faulkner did with his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, or Ellen Gilchrist did in her early stories of Uptown New Orleans, Pat Conroy with coastal South Carolina or, dast I say it, Thomas Wolfe with Altamont/Asheville.

In Caldwell's case, it is the Cataloochee Valley of Western North Carolina, in Haywood County. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Caldwell's novels are set, Cataloochee was a thriving small farming community. It was a lovely if isolated hemlock-, maple-and pine-rimmed valley, set among 6,000-foot peaks. Cataloochee today is the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park's answer to Cades Cove, only more remote and harder to get to.

In Requiem, Caldwell's mountaineers, at the time when the U.S. government was buying up property for the new national park, are wrestling with the decision of whether to take the money and move out of their Edenic valley, or, paradoxically, to stay and watch it return to its state of natural grace.

Fire starts and ends the book, the first fire a surprisingly practical way to improve the education of the children of the valley; the last fires to purge evil from the valley and perhaps to light the way to an old mountain man's ultimate reward. In between there is fire every page or two - a Home Comfort cook stove, a lesson on how to build a fire in a fireplace, a discussion about the virtues of different kinds of firewood.

Plotting is not Caldwell's forte. Requiem by Fire, like his Cataloochee before it, is essentially a collection of character sketches and vignettes, woven - or, rather, patched - together into a quilt we can call the Cataloochee design: cantankerous old Silas Wright, the disgustingly evil Willie McPeters (a character never better named); the tragically mated Jim and Nell Hawkins; and Aunt Mary, who jaws with the spirit of her dead husband, Hiram.

But that doesn't matter. What Caldwell does is much more important than plotting. He has captured the soul of the mountains and put it on paper forever.

Caldwell respects and reveres the language of the mountains. Every chapter is a thesaurus of mountain expressions. He's probably the only serious writer in America who knows that in the Southern Appalachians a dope used to be a Coca-Cola.

I once did a guidebook to the Smokies, but I only know Cataloochee in a superficial way. I went back there a few days ago, to see the old deserted farmhouses in the spring and the elk grazing the new grass in the low pastures. Like us, the elk seem to enjoy staying down where it's flat and where there's plenty of food to eat. I communed with an old bull elk that was hanging out, all by himself, in the yard of the Palmer House.

At Cataloochee I read some of the last chapters of Requiem. It moved me deeply. I'm putting this novel and Cataloochee on my shelf next to the wonderful of books of John Parris, whose writings on my mountains and my people are sadly out of print and ignored today. Let us hope that never happens to Requiem by Fire and Cataloochee.

Full disclosure: Wayne Caldwell and I went to the same high school, where we were both early Bob Dylan fans, and I have known him off and on since.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sad But Wonderful Story, May 27, 2010

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Darrell Vandover (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Requiem by Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

Having stood in Cataloochee as it exists today and walked through the buildings that were allowed to remain, I have a special fondness for this location, as do the characters in the novel. In fact, I am sure that Silas Wright would be laughing at me as well, as I come to camp and hike through what he considered to be his home town. While it is wonderful that the government chose to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it is equally sad that it destroyed communities and ways of life that had been ingrained for nearly a hundred years. This sadness is captured by Mr Caldwell in Requiem by Fire. In between he also captures the mountain lifestyle, the disentegation of a mis-matched marriage, the descent into a special (and perverse)kind of madness, the effect of the great depression on fairly typical Americans, and, in a very funny section, the beginnings of mountain gift and craft shops that live on in the Smoky Mountain Craft Community to this day. And, perhaps most poignantly, the last years and death of a man determined to live out his life in the place of his birth. His characters are rich and fully developed and I disagree with the previous reviewer about his plotting. He captured the end of an era very well. In fact, I expect to find old Jim Hawkins still policing the valley on my next visit. An excellent read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another winner!, May 20, 2010

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Sirde "artist761" (Sautee Nacoochee,GA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Requiem by Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is another 5 star winner from this author. A sequel to "Cattaloochee", his first, and equally wonderful. You become so familiar with the characters , you could almost recognized them if they were to walk in your line of vision. His description of place and time period is excellent.