Ron Rash’s first novel in 10 years is one you’ll think about for a long time, for all the reasons you remember a fine book. Its people are real, flawed, rooted in a time and place well-told. They’re people who want what most of us want: to be happy, to be loved, to do good work in a place that holds them close.
Photo Above: Ron Rash. The Caretaker. Doubleday, 2023. 252pp.
The novel opens with a young soldier, Jacob Hampton, doing guard duty on a frozen river in North Korea. He’s thinking about his 17-year-old pregnant wife, Naomi, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where his well-to-do family has disowned him for marrying her.
Jacob has left his best friend and blood brother, Blackburn Gant, to take care of Naomi. And though the opening chapter has a cliffhanger outcome for Jacob, it’s Blackburn you’ll follow through the novel with compassion and hope. Left facially deformed by a hard case of polio as a child, Blackburn accepted the job of cemetery caretaker at 16, living alone in the cemetery cottage. And when Jacob’s mother devises a Machiavellian plot to destroy Jacob and Naomi’s marriage, Blackburn is pulled in deep as his attraction to Naomi grows.
No one writes about Appalachia more truly than Ron Rash, whose family goes back to the mid-1700s in western North Carolina. He knows the flowers and trees and the intricate music of the language. Reading Ron Rash out loud is like singing a Childe ballad, and always, you’ll learn what it means to be human in the place called Appalachia.
Ron Rash. The Caretaker. Doubleday, 2023. 252pp.
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2024 issue.
