The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 June 2020
by Molly Dektar
Dissatisfaction with our lives, with the culture at large, is a condition endemic in humanity. We have been creating and following movements of one sort or another since we started walking upright. Often, those movements are a move backward, or to some simpler ideal of what human life should be like. Over and over again, communes, cults, communities and religions have been founded on the notion of getting back to basics. And, of course, these movements often have deeply unconventional ideas of how society should be constructed. In the end, many of them end up being held together by the charisma of a single leader, and disturbingly, they turn to violence or self destruction to further justify their unconventional relationship to world, and adversarial relationship to society as a whole. Every once in a while, one of these communities outlives a generation and has a greater influence on history. The Mormons are one such subculture. Some of the communes from the 1960s still endure. But it would be a mistake to think these things come and go. They're always with us.
Which is part of the point of this small novel, set in a community of a couple dozen individuals on a subsistence farm in Appalachia. Subsistence is the point, as the farm survives on the hard work of its members, its livestock and gardens, as well as the occasional dumpster dive back in town. It is led by a man calling himself Dice, whom the members tend to obey without question. Lead recruiter is Bay, and we meet him when our narrator and protagonist, Berie, arrives with him at the farm and gets herself renamed Harmony. She is escaping the Fake World. The farm is the Real World. And its grit and immediacy tend to convince us that it is, especially contrasted with the bright colored plastic of the world we've chosen to live in. Family members rarely, if ever, leave the farm. Their dismissal of the rest of the world is what Dice uses to keep them in line. There is an eco-apocalyptic ethic at work, and the group occasionally conducts small actions against the coal mining interests in the mountains. At the same time, the threat of development of the land itself is never far away. Key to any cult's cohesion is the threat from without.
All of which is common fodder for novels all the way back to Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. More disturbing here is the nature of our hero's effort to escape the world she rejects, and to seek a world suited to her nature. To Mother Nature, as well. She wants an authentic connection to the Earth and the Family offers that. But our protagonist is disturbingly pliant. She is ready to surrender her agency to the two men she identifies as strongest in the group. Her readiness to do so makes her a difficult character with whom to spend the duration of a novel spanning two years. Nominally, her surrender is due to the absence of her father and the conventional expectations of her mother. But her sway to every strong-willed man who crosses her path makes for a somewhat frustrating read. On the other hand, it also makes her prime fodder for a cult. She is ready and willing to be commanded. Even her doubts ring hollow.
So, we have a very young woman ever ready to surrender, and a cult on the brink of self-annihilation. The book has a dark and dank atmosphere, given by the shadowy light of a forested mountain hollow. The author's appeal to nature is profound, though, and her descriptions of the flora and fauna of the mountains and of these people's everyday existence are vivid and near-poetic. The characters we meet are riven with contradictory motivations. In a group of twenty-four, we ever get to know only four or five members of the cult, and the story sways a bit within its unfilled frame. Harmony is a frustrating character, and her fate as ambiguous as Dice's potential for violence. Yet her motivations are familiar enough. The cult stands in contrast to the rest of the world, and one asks, as one often does, why is it that something built on potentially high ideals, would so often crash and burn into the ashes that fertilize the next.