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It’s late June, 1936, in eastern Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority has dammed the Long Man River, and the town of Yuneetah is disappearing. Long-held family land and homesteads, churches and schools and cemeteries, sacrificed for the promise of electricity. Depression-struck farmers have sold off their land and headed north to work in factories.
Photo Above: Long Man by Amy Greene. Knopf, 2014. 276 pp.
This is what the unnamed woman sees from her mountaintop at the start of Amy Greene’s second novel, watching the lake expand and erase everything she knows: “This time next year, if she came up here looking for a little more light she would see only miles of endless blue lake.”
But down below, Annie Clyde Dodson, mother of three-year-old Gracie, won’t bend to her husband’s wanting to abandon the family’s 40-acre farm. Or to the ongoing pressure of the TVA case worker and the local sheriff. The land is her family’s legacy, and Annie Clyde wants her daughter to know she fought to keep it.
The present action of the novel occurs over just three days, when Gracie and her dog Rusty go missing. And Annie Clyde thinks she knows who took her daughter: the one-eyed drifter, Amos, who’s hopped a freight and come back to town. Annie Clyde’s got a gun, and she won’t be afraid to use it when she finds him.
Greene is a beautiful writer, and her characters are complex and haunting. There’s not a single player in this novel you won’t care about—even the mysterious and vaguely threatening Amos—and the end will leave you glad that there are writers who can so skillfully use historic fact to reveal the human heart.
Long Man by Amy Greene. Knopf, 2014. 276 pp.
The story above first appeared in our January / February 2024 issue.
