Judging from his new short story collection, Ron Rash not only attended the Joyce Carol Oates Life Sucks School of Contemporary American Gothic, he graduated first in his class.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, Rash’s 14th book, contains 14 very dark stories. A few feature doofus characters, giving them a cartoon quality and lightening things up — a little. The rest are just plain dark. Well-crafted, to be sure. Masterfully crafted, even. But dark.

The title, borrowed from Robert Frost’s lyric poem with the same name, is a sizeable clue to what Rash is up to thematically. Life starts in spring, in Eden. But it’s just a matter of time before we screw things up.

And sure enough, virtually every one of Rash’s stories begins with hope: a chance of escape from a chain gang, enough of a score at an Indian casino to ward off the repo man, the promise of a college education and a life lifted out of poverty.

And every story, or nearly so, ends about as bad for the protagonist as you can imagine. In most cases worse. Rash’s stories are the perfect opposite of the redemption tales in publications such as Guidepost, where the message is always the same: Jesus saves.

“Watch for falling rocks” is the message here, though they’ll land on your head anyway so never mind and please pass the Oxycontin (as the characters in the title story would say).

Rash’s stories cut through time — the Civil War, the 60s, the new millennium — but stay firmly rooted in Appalachia and the depressed towns, fictional and real, around Cullowhee, N.C., and straddling the North Carolina-Tennessee border. (Rash, on the faculty at Western Carolina University, is a noted writer of Appalachian tales.)

Trailer parks. Rednecks. Trucks and guns and bear traps and divorce. Flannery O’Connor territory. Add meth labs. Subtract salvation.

The best of Rash’s stories, written in a spare prose style, have an aching lyricism as they chronicle the hard times and hard fall of his characters. The best of the best will haunt the reader long after they’re done — if the reader has the good sense to stop for a while before starting in on the next story in the collection.

The problem with reading Nothing Gold Can Stay straight through is that too many of the stories follow the same narrative trajectory. You know what’s coming next, how the story will end, anyway, and you know it’s not going to be good.

My recommendation: Start with “The Trusty,” a swift kick in the teeth that first appeared in The New Yorker. Wait a few days. Give yourself over to the tragic world of “Something Rich and Strange.” Let that haunt you for a while. Read “The Dowry.” Flinch, take a deep breath and let that one settle. Then move on to the final story in the collection, “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out.” Have yourself a good cry as you marvel at its terrible beauty.

Maybe it’s true, as Frost wrote, that nothing gold can stay. But there’s a powerful certainty that these short stories at least — the finest by a very fine writer — will stay with you for a long time to come.

Steve Watkins is the author of several books, both fiction and nonfiction, including The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire; My Chaos Theory: Stories; What Comes After, a young adult novel; and Down Sand Mountain, winner of the Golden Kite Award for Young Adult Fiction. His new novel, Juvie, will be published next year by Candlewick Press.

comments powered by Disqus