Customer Reviews

Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books)

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

 

 

Robert Ashcom is a master of sewing magic and emotion into the English language.
His newest novel, WINTER RUN, invites readers to walk through rural Virginia in the 1940s. The story is set around Charlie, a curious, adventuresome boy (think Huck Finn) and his family, friends, animals and farm. It is with these aspects of life - family, friends and duty - that the proud young boy becomes a strong but sensitive man.
Now, most critics may associate 'rural' with boring, but not so in WINTER RUN. What audiences must pay attention to, in my opinion, is Ashcom's verbal sorcery.
He snaps photographs with words and tells fireside stories with narrative; his work commands the attention of anyone with serious interest in American literature.

"What would you take to read if you were going to a desert island?" Shakespeare and the Bible usually head most quick lists, but more extended reflection usually hones in on categories. "Fiction?" "NonFiction?" "Poetry?" "Books?" "Magazines?"
We were reminded this week that William Faulkner's hunting stories are our continuing choice of fiction (or semi-fiction). Ever since we discovered them ("The Bear," "Delta Autumn," "The Old People," and the rest) over forty years ago, they have represented the essence of transcendentalism, the spiritualization of nature, the romanticizing of youthful innocence and of love of simplicity, and a vanishing rural southern landscape recalled and enshrined.
But we had not realized what a vacuum absorbing those stories long ago had left in our soul, what an ache and emptiness we felt because the link they expressed for us between youthful innocence and primitive woods had been left behind for decades, with no literary replacement in sight. Faulkner was gone, Eden had vanished, we had aged, the woods had been carved and asphalted and wired, and we had learned to live amidst modernity, masses, and motion.
The woods had been our first school, and being grown and gone from them, we learned to substitute real campuses for those vanished cathedrals. But it is not the same.
Sheerly by chance we lucked upon a little book by Robert Ashcom: Winter Run: Stories of an enchanted boyhood in a lost time and place (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002). Ashcom is a farmer-writer in Warrenton, VA, who has been a school teacher, a breeder and trainer of thoroughbred horses, and master of hounds and huntsman for the Tryon Hounds in NC half an hour away from us.
Set in Virginia, probably near Charlottesville, Winter Run is the episodic account of the coming age of young Charlie Lewis in the post World War II years.
The stories are very Faulkneresque. Charlie Lewis, whom we watch grow (in wisdom, stature, curiosity, interests) from age six to fifteen, reminds us of Chuck Manson, and his black mentor, Matthew, is an evocation of Faulkner's Antaeus-like Ike McCaslin or Sam Fathers, stewards of the old ways at one with the land.
Each Ashcom story stands on its own merits, but all are linked through recurring central characters and the chronicle of Charlie's development and the presence of native storytellers. In assorted episodes, Charlie defies authority by facing down a huge boar in a pigpen, falls in love with a one-eyed mule, buries the mule, gets a pony, encounters a red-tailed hawk, watches his absentee executive father turn into a hero through conquering a roaring forest fire, hunts possums, learns about fox hounds, learns foxhunting, tracks and pets a gray vixen fox, learns about bird dogs, participates in November hog killings, captures a cottonmouth snake, and attends funerals of family and mentors.
But these are only the "occasions", milestones in a boy's evolution. What gives them meaning is author Ashcom's ability to turn commonplace and ordinary experiences into spiritual epiphanies, to see the meanings behind meanderings, to find divinity in dogs and dirt and drudgery.
If the evidence of God's working through seasons, land, rituals, mysteries of nature, and experienced parochial people is not clear enough to the reader, Ashcom makes it explicit in the final chapter, when an old Charlie, long gone from his farm and woods and influences, returns to the Episcopal chapel his father helped build.
In prose that can summons tears or laughter almost effortlessly, Ashcom succeeds in transforming what has to be his own story into fiction that rings of reality and emotions that all southern boys who are now old men will recognize. The ability to express for us sentiments and to find meanings often too deep for our own words makes Robert Ashcom a welcomed visitor in our lives.
Farmers have vanished (down to only two percent of the national work force), but what we belatedly have recognized is that the most important crops of the old farms was not tobacco, nor cotton, nor corn, nor livestock-but farmers, sturdy citizens whom Jefferson idolized and whom we can only remember wistfully.

Reviewers often say of memoirs "It read like a well-crafted novel." This book is the opposite: a novel that reads like a well crafted memoir.

The writing is gorgeous and lush, and the story introduced me to Charlie, a child of city folks who move to the country in the 1940's. I was captured by his deep connection to the natural world and moved by the inevitable loss of his innocence. I highly recomend this rich and layered read.

Set just after WW11 in Virginia, in a seemingly idyllic rural world that will come to an end, Winter Run follows the escapades of young Charlie from the age of eight through to fourteen. At a time when Blacks and Whites accepted their segregation, yet had respect, the fair skinned blond haired son of a Scandinavian mother Charlie spends much of his time with the Blacks of the community, learning the ways of the countryside. He is adventurous, sometimes to his own endangerment, he has a love of animals and rural life, and from the age of eight would ride his pony alone and unhindered across the farmland.

Winter Run is not a continuous story, but a series of episode in Charlie's life, sometimes told by Charlie, but more often by other observers. The result is a wonderful account of a time now lost, a time not perfect, but a time of innocence and of close community. It makes a most rewarding and leisurely read, at times funny, often touching, but never mawkish.