The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story [Hardcover]

Matt Bondurant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2008

Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition and in the years after. Forrest, the eldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted, these men forge a business, fall in love, and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die, their father's business fail, and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought.

White mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut -- whatever you called it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson, the journalist and author of Winesburg, Ohio, was covering a story there, he christened it the "wettest county in the world." In the twilight of his career, Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers, piece together the clues linking them to "The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy," and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County.

In vivid, muscular prose, Matt Bondurant brings these men -- their dark deeds, their long silences, their deep desires -- to life. His understanding of the passion, violence, and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This fictionalized tale of Depression-era bootlegging from Bondurant (The Third Translation) enlists the help of Winesburg, Ohio author Sherwood Anderson to investigate Bondurant family lore. In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant's real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They're after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest's throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area's prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson's arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men. Bondurant endows his gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It's a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose. (Oct.) ""
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From Booklist

This family saga follows the Bondurants, bootlegging brothers runnin’ stills, runnin’ loads, and runnin’ from the law in Depression-era Virginia. The book is mainly narrated through the experience of the youngest Bondurant, Jack (in truth, a grandfather of the author), and his family’s moonshine enterprise supplies the action in a plot that evokes the culture of distilling and distributing white lightning. To optimistic Jack, bootlegging is both a bond to his older brothers, Forrest and Howard, and a means to make cash to impress a girl. Forrest, by contrast, is taciturn and suspicious: the world is violent, and he meets it on that ground. Tender of the stills and imbiber from same, burly Howard is always ready to take on the Bondurants’ enemies, corrupt law officers. Wending through this conflict in flash-forward mode is novelist Sherwood Anderson, who plumbs the Bondurant story a few years after the brothers’ climactic confrontation with the county sheriff. Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416561390
• ISBN-13: 978-1416561392
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Matt Bondurant's new novel The Night Swimmer (Scribner) will be published in January, 2012. His second novel The Wettest County in the World (Scribner 2008) was a New York Times Editor's Pick, and San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year. His first novel The Third Translation (Hyperion 2005) was an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. A former John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf, Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State, and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee, Matt's short fiction has been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, and Glimmer Train, and he has recently held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in Texas. (mattbondurant.com)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enticing, Graphic, Americana, and Utterly Brilliant, October 30, 2008

By 

Burgmicester (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I am a sucker for good historic fiction and this is an excellent slice of Americana from the red clay dirt of Virginia: Franklin County, to be exact. The story starts in 1918 with the introduction of the Bondurant family and the trials of the day - the great influenza epidemic. From there the story jumps to 1934 (current timeframe) and then to and from 1928 as it brings the background into the story. This is done very nicely and the story is brought together from several angles using the real life reporter/writer - Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio - now available from the Guttenberg Project public domain), as way to tell the story from the present tense. Anderson mentions that he has had run-ins with Hemmingway and Billy Faulkner - and as I read this story, I couldn't help but to see Bondurant's attempt at a similar style to Faulkner, but with an updated and more modern flair. The characterizations are rich and peeled back like an onion to reveal layer after layer of the main characters' history and development. The author also uses a technique that I haven't seen - there are no quotations to delineate the verbalizations between characters. Not unlike some of the masters of the past, Bondurant has established a writing persona - i.e. Faulkner's use of not identifying the character and making the reader use their own identification through the conversation.

Matt Bondurant calls this a work of fiction based on fact from his family's legend - thereby giving the reader a glimpse into the Bondurant family tree. The time frame are the years just before prohibition has been extinguished, and the moonshine business is in full swing in Franklin County with the Bondurant brothers thick in it. There is a little of everything in this book and the author concisely tells the tale in about 300 pages. But the story is not just told to the reader, it is described in terrific detail with sometimes graphic and sometimes beautiful prose. As you are grabbed by the story, it is nearly impossible to put down this book.

The author has researched his subject material very well indeed. His depiction of this era is superb and the wording paints the mural so well the reader is visualizing the entire surroundings. You are in Franklin County and watching the events, not reading them. This is a brilliant work and well worth the time to read it - and it won't take you long, as I just couldn't stop until it was finished.

This is a slice of time in America that we can only read about and Matt Bondurant is able to give us this period of time and allows us to leave our current life and live within this one. Often people will ask why I read so many books, and I'll say that with a good book, I can be transported into the story, into a time that I never saw, or into a place that I'll never visit; this is one of those books. This not just a good book; I rarely give out 5 stars, but Matt Bondurant has earned all five of them with this potential classic.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Material, Not So Great Presentation, November 20, 2008

By 

Aderyn (Small-Town Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

During Prohibition and beyond, Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant (the author's great-uncles and grandfather) decided that one way to keep their families going through the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and a crippling drought was to found a moonshine dynasty. The infamous Bondurant brothers were major bootleggers in Franklin County, Virginia, which Sherwood Anderson, covering a story there, called "the wettest county in the world."

Although the material that Bondurant has to work with reflects a fascinating period in America's history, I found his presentation of it somewhat dry (no pun intended!) and often confusing. He chooses to use a straightforward prose style that minimizes punctuation; for example, quotation marks are eliminated altogether and commas nearly so. This style can be intrusive even in the best writers' hands (Cormac McCarthy comes to mind). There is, after all, good reason why punctuation was standardized to begin with: Remember your primary teachers telling you that it is meant to help the reader? It's true, for this reader at least.

Also, the novel jumps around in time, from 1918 to 1934 to 1928 to 1929 and again to 1934, back to 1919 then to 1930, and so on. To a limited extent, this approach helps pique the reader's interest, as when, for instance, we meet two of the Bondurants' competitors in the hospital, appallingly mutilated, while in the reader's mind the Bondurants are still just simple farming folk. Because the timeframe moves so frequently and randomly, though, the reader finds himself often disoriented and struggling to piece together the story. I repeatedly had to flip back to check what year it was and work out whether some earlier event was part of the foundation for what was happening now or whether it hadn't occurred yet.

Sherwood Anderson serves as a sort-of narrator, staying in Franklin County to do research to write about what was happening there. For the most part, this helps the novel, bringing to it an unenlightened point of view that parallels the reader's own. However, the frequent references to Anderson's testy relationship with other authors of his time, the building of his new house, and other details of his life outside of Franklin County add needless minutiae for the reader to sort through and allocate to their places in the story; ultimately, they have none, and seem to be mostly just an English major showing off.

I had a difficult time getting to know and care about the book's characters, at least partly because of the effort it took just to follow their stories. It wasn't until nearly the end of the book that it began to matter to me how any of it turned out. One of the parts I liked best was the brief author's note at the end, because by then I finally knew everyone and was interested in what had become of them. I wish the author had made this happen much earlier.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating story, January 25, 2011

By 

MelindaC "Melinda Clayton" (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story (Paperback)

This was a tough, yet gripping, book to read. The author pulled no punches in describing life during Prohibition Appalachia. The characters were wholly unappealing, and the story was often uncomfortable to read. Kudos to the author for capturing the essence of the times. What made it an even more difficult read, however, was the style the author chose to use in writing the book. Often disjointed and wandering, the story was at times difficult to follow. The author favors a style that blends past tense with present, often multiple times within one sentence. This detracted from the story and, unfortunately, made it difficult to read at times. Nevertheless, the story is a provocative work of historical semi-fiction, and offers a gritty but realistic glimpse of the times.