He sets his novels in Appalachia because that’s the place he knows. But they’re more about humanity.
North Carolina author David Joy has been touted by critics and other writers for his deep understanding of Appalachia.
“The Line That Held Us,” his latest book, is described as a “novel of Appalachian noir,” according to his publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
This story unfolds when Darl Moody accidentally kills a man instead of a “monster buck.” But Moody doesn’t want to face the retribution of the man’s family so he asks a friend to help him hide the murder.
The book will be published Aug. 14, and Joy has several book events scheduled in North Carolina.
Joy, who lives in Jackson County, explains he’s not writing about a region so much as about flawed people whose stories should resonate with people anywhere.
Joy writes in a 2017 essay, “Digging in the Trash,” that outsiders observe that Joy’s landscape is dotted with churches and trailers.
“What I hope they see too, though, is that this is a place sopping wet with raw emotion, a landscape drenched with humanity,” he writes in the essay published by The Bitter Southerner. “It is all I know, and it is beautiful.”
Joy, 34, who received his bachelor’s in literature at Western Carolina University, keeps his prose close to home. All of his work is set in his home of Jackson County, including his novels, “Where All Light Tends to Go,” and “The Weight of This World,” and the memoir, “Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey.”
In 2015, Joy received the North Carolina Arts Council grant in the prose category. Joy’s debut novel, “Where All Light Tends to Go,” was a finalist for the Edgar, Macavity, and SIBA Book Awards and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award.
Joy took a few minutes between hiking and his book tour to talk about Appalachia, Jackson County and humanity.
Q: What defines your Appalachia?
A: I set all of my books here but I’ve made it pretty clear I’m not trying to write books about Appalachia. I’m writing these amped-up tragedies in the same way Donald Ray Pollock is. If you read Donald Ray Pollock, I don’t think he’s trying to present southern Ohio. He’s telling an exciting story in a place that he knows. That’s what I’m doing…
I’ve written primarily about working-class local people tied to this place for generations. And in the background of these novels, that’s where you see the reality of the area I live. You see local people displaced by gentrification.
Q: Your novels are all set in Jackson County, N.C. Describe to a stranger, what Jackson County looks, feels and smells like?
A: That’s a little bit hard for me to do. I can think of it in terms of what it’s not. Haywood County, there’s a lot more agriculture here and cleared land here. One county over further west in Macon County, there’s a lot more farmland. You got a lot more flat area.
For the most part, Jackson County is incredibly steep land. We’ve got the headwaters of four rivers: the Tuckasegee, Chattooga, Whitewater and the Horsepasture. The land is really steep and historically unusable. We are a tropical rainforest…
As far as what local people do, local people work state jobs such as the DOT (Department of Transportation). There’s also a lot of people in construction. It’s building second and third homes for people who are going to stay here for a couple of months out of the year. Over the past 10 years, they have been pushing tourism.
Q: You have said, “I write books with teeth.” What are you chewing on?
A: I think lots of things. I think what I mean by that is a lot of readers don’t want to read hard books. They want to read a book that’s easy to get through and has a happy ending. That’s not the types of books I write. The books I’ve written tend to ask some pretty big questions. I think that last book (“The Weight of this World”) was a treatise on violence and trauma. I think that’s a hard place for anybody to go.
I don’t want to write easy books. This new book is hard as well. It’s not for everybody. I think it takes a pretty courageous reader to read the types of books I write.
Q: What’s one thing that your book reveals about Appalachia that we haven’t heard before?
A: Again, I don’t know I’m trying to write about Appalachia. My books are set here because this is the place I know. There are things happening in the background that are very telling about this place. Those things are a lot more nuanced; they are not the heart of the story.
The heart of this novel is that question that Dwayne Brewer asks Calvin at the end of the book. He looks at him and says, “For whom are you willing to lay down your life, friend? Outside of that there is nothing.” The idea of who do you love enough that is selfless. What people in your life are important enough, that you would lay down your own?
Q: In Southern fiction, doesn’t place become a character?
A: People and place in Appalachia and in rural places in general are an inseparable thing. People are tied to the land here still in a way most people can’t fathom. People living in cities can’t understand that type of attachment to place. So when you read a book like this, place takes on its own personality. It’s an unavoidable presence.
But the idea of regionalization is largely dismissive. You never hear that about a book set in New York City or in a large city. Those books are just books. What’s dismissive about that is that at the heart of every story, there’s humanity. That’s what Eudora Welty meant when she said, “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” The idea is through the particular contains the universal.
Details
David Joy will talk about his novel, “The Line That Held Us,” (G.P. Putnam Sons, Aug. 14) at several bookstores.
▪ Aug. 15, 7 p.m., at Quail Ridge Books & Music, 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, located in North Hills Shopping Center in Raleigh.
▪ Aug. 16, 7 p.m., at Flyleaf Books, 752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Chapel Hill.
▪ Aug. 18, 11 a.m., at McIntyre’s Books, 220 Market St., in Fearrington Village in Pittsboro.
▪ Aug. 18, 5 p.m. at Main Street Books, 126 S. Main St., Davidson
This story was originally published August 11, 2018 at 12:12 PM.