Serena: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains--but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.

Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.

The Gift of Silence: An Essay by Ron Rash

When readers ask how I came to be a writer, I usually mention several influences: my parents’ teaching by example the importance of reading; a grandfather who, though illiterate, was a wonderful storyteller; and, as I grew older, an awareness that my region had produced an inordinate number of excellent writers and that I might find a place in that tradition. Nevertheless, I believe what most made me a writer was my early difficulty with language.

My mother tells me that certain words were impossible for me to pronounce, especially those with j’s and g’s. Those hard consonants were like tripwires in my mouth, causing me to stumble over words such as “jungle” and “generous.” My parents hoped I would grow out of this problem, but by the time I was five, I’d made no improvement. There was no speech therapist in the county, but one did drive in from the closest city once a week.

That once a week was a Saturday morning at the local high school. For an hour the therapist worked with me. I don’t remember much of what we did in those sessions, except that several times she held my hands to her face as she pronounced a word. I do remember how large and empty the classroom seemed with just the two of us in it, and how small I felt sitting in a desk made for teenagers.

I improved, enough so that by summer’s end the therapist said I needed no further sessions. I still had trouble with certain words (one that bedevils me even today is “gesture”), but not enough that when I entered first grade my classmates and teacher appeared to notice. Nevertheless, certain habits of silence had taken hold. It was not just self-consciousness. Even before my sessions with the speech therapist, I had convinced myself that if I listened attentively enough to others my own tongue would be able to mimic their words. So I listened more than I spoke. I became comfortable with silence, and, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time alone wandering nearby woods and creeks. I entertained myself with stories I made up, transporting myself into different places, different selves. I was in training to be a writer, though of course at that time I had yet to write more than my name.

Yet my most vivid memory of that summer is not the Saturday morning sessions at the high school but one night at my grandmother’s farmhouse. After dinner, my parents, grandmother and several other older relatives gathered on the front porch. I sat on the steps as the night slowly enveloped us, listening intently as their tongues set free words I could not master. Then it appeared. A bright-green moth big as an adult’s hand fluttered over my head and onto the porch, drawn by the light filtering through the screen door. The grown-ups quit talking as it brushed against the screen, circled overhead, and disappeared back into the night. It was a luna moth, I learned later, but in my mind that night it became indelibly connected to the way I viewed language--something magical that I grasped at but that was just out of reach.

In first grade, I began learning that loops and lines made from lead and ink could be as communicative as sound. Now, almost five decades later, language, spoken or written, is no longer out of reach, but it remains just as magical as that bright-green moth. What writer would wish it otherwise.

From The New Yorker

Set in 1929, in the rugged mountains of North Carolina, Rash's novel is a tightly knit tale of industrial development, greed, and betrayal. George Pemberton and his new bride, Serena, maintain a close watch over a burgeoning logging empire, dealing with their workers while fighting off the efforts of environmental activists to expand the country's network of national parks. As the title character, a Depression-era Lady Macbeth wholly comfortable in the wilderness drives her husband to commit increasingly malevolent acts, he must also contend with the reemergence of a woman with whom he had an illegitimate child years earlier. Rash's evocative rendering of the blighted landscape and the tough characters who inhabit it recalls both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, while the malignant character of Serena, who projects a stark unflinching certainty about her actions, propels his finely paced story.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (October 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061470856
• ISBN-13: 978-0061470851
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,243 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars as deep and dark as the shadowed mountain hollows, September 25, 2008

By	David W. Straight (knoxville, tennessee United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Serena is an expansion of a long short story by Ron Rash. Pemberton's Bride is the longest and the best of the tales in Chemistry. A second short story from that book, Speckled Trout, was expanded into the novel The World Made Straight. Not many short stories--even long short stories such as Pemberton's Bride--can be made into successful full-length novels. Too often the result has a padded feel to it, as with Edgerton's Bible Salesman, which would have worked best as a novella. But Pemberton's Bride had a power to it, and was intense, compact, dark, and strongly character-driven. There are two central figures--George Pemberton and his new wife Serena--who arrive in western North Carolina to oversee operations on Pemberton's logging operation. A few of the main parts of the plot are altered when the 46-page short story was expanded into a 370-page novel, but the novel is deeper, richer, and darker--there's never a sense of padding.

The very first paragraph of the novel (and short story) quickly set the lasting tone: in 1929 a backwoods father waits on the station platform for the arrival of the Pembertons. He is accompanied by his 16 or 17-year old daughter, pregnant by Pemberton, and carries a freshly-honed bowie knife to plunge into Pemberton's heart. After the Pembertons arrive, some words are exchanged, Harmon draws his bowie knife and approaches Pemberton. "'We're settling this now,' Harmon shouted. 'He's right,' Serena said, "Get your knife and settle it now, Pemberton.'" Which Pemberton indeed does. So you immediately see that Serena is no shrinking violet. She's tough--tougher than Pemberton--and brutal--more brutal than Pemberton. People who stand in the Pembertons' way have an unfortunate tendency to die, usually unpleasantly. Sheriff McDowell is the only one who can stand up to the Pembertons, and this is only because of toleration on the Pembertons' part. Logging during the Depression is hard and dangerous work: accidents, debilitating and fatal, are all too common, and there is always a group looking for work, for whom accidents to the logging crews mean possible job openings. There's the frightening Galloway, who does Serena's bidding and who brings death in his wake. For some authors, carefully-drawn characters are rare (usually compensated for with action). But with Rash, even unimportant people are carefully drawn. You feel as if you've come to know people well--you may not like them, but you know them.

There are two other Southern writers that this novel brings to mind. First is Cormac Mccarthy. Some of Mccarthy's works have the same lyrical dark depth that Serena has, particularly the brooding Child of God. Child of God has a wonderful phrase in it "The provinces of night" which was used as the title of a novel that the second writer used. William Gay's novels have the same dark nature that Child of God and Serena have. All three authors have a lyrical quality to their writing, an ease with words and phrases. "Southern Gothic" might describe their work. Serena is a strong work indeed, and one that you'll look forward to rereading.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Violent, Bold, and Complex, September 5, 2008

By	Tim Peeler "snopes" (north carolina) - See all my reviews

One of Ron Rash's early short stories relates the tale of a Chinese potter who in despair, having failed to produce the perfect glaze and color for his pots, flings himself into the oven. The result, of course, is pottery that bears the glaze and tone that he sought. To a certain extent, this is what Rash has done with SERENA. Years of near maniacal labor have produced what is clearly his finest work of fiction to date. The story is epic; the female protagonist is like nothing in American literary fiction; and as the early sale of film rights would indicate, the novel is all but screen-ready.

What makes this a really fine novel, however, is not just character development or plot or neo-Elizabethan convention. It is the line-by-line attention that a reader might ordinarily expect from poetry. Page after page, in SERENA, I got the same feeling that I get when reading McCarthy or Faulkner, the feeling that every word matters, the feeling that when Rash revised this novel, he didn't just try to fix what might have appeared awkward or out of tune. He did his best to make it as seamless and "perfect" as his sanity would allow. In the process he produced a balance between tension and humor, grimness and grit, destruction and reclamation while creating a role that will likely accelerate some lucky actress's career.

48 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterwork of style and storytelling, August 16, 2008

By	R. Cooper "Ron Cooper" (Ocala, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ron Rash's previous books got better as they came along, but I don't know how he'll top this. This is the best American novel I have read of the 21st century, and in many ways it tells a uniquely American story.

Even with the main characters' Macbethean megalomania, manipulation, and murderousness, Rash is far too gifted a writer to create two-dimensional villains. Like the other characters in this novel, the protagonists are complex, reacting to conflicting motives and second-guessing all those around them. Serena Pemberton is the most powerful, unforgettable character I have encountered in years.

This is a novel that achieves what only the best do: a mesmerizing story, indelible characters, and gorgeous writing. If you doubt that Ron Rash is the best writer in America, pick up Serena.