Ash
Falls
Warren
Read
ig
Publishing
306pgs
978-1-63246047-9
Reviewed
by Gonzalo Baeza
The
gritty opening of Warren Read’s debut novel Ash Falls (2017)
introduces us to convict Ernie Luntz. Serving time for murder, Luntz
is being transported from the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla
Walla to a medium security prison. When the driver has a heart attack
and the car crashes, Luntz trains “his eyes on the tiny farmhouses
freckling the far horizon” and disappears into the countryside.
Luntz
also vanishes from the story and instead becomes an ominous presence
– an individual whose singular act of violence created a traumatic
schism in the Pacific Northwest town of Ash Falls. Almost like a
Chekhovian gun introduced in the opening act, whether Luntz will
return to the scene of the crime –and the story– is a question
that lingers in this accomplished novel driven by the strength of its
characters.
Each
chapter in Ash Falls is named after a character or a set of
characters and told in a close third-person point of view. Through
their stories, Read weaves a kaleidoscopic tapestry of a downtrodden
community, where Luntz seems to be the embodiment of a deeper malaise
brought by isolation and economic depression.
High
school nurse Bobbie is Luntz’s ex-wife. She tries to carry on with
her life and raise her teenage son Patrick on her own after her
husband went to jail. Four years ago, Luntz was involved in an
altercation with a group of teenagers. After one of the boys, Ricky
Cordero, says “something” to Patrick, Luntz beats him to death.
Read’s account of the event is deliberately muddled, just like
real-life impactful happenings are often blurred by emotions and the
convenient rationalizations that allow us to move on with life. Later
on, we learn that Luntz is a Vietnam veteran who sometimes reacts
violently, often sleepwalks, and may even have burnt down a building
in town while in a state of somnambulism. Like a detective trying to
build a narrative from disparate accounts, Read comes up with a story
where past events pose as many questions as they provide answers.
There
are hints that Bobbie once had an affair with former teacher Hank
Kelleher, but Ernie’s crime seems to have driven them apart. Hank
now sells pot and pays house visits to his typically impoverished,
elderly customers. These interactions bring to mind the risks
involved in his new trade and often make him doubt:
“It
was moments like these – when things came unexpected, when the
money didn’t match the promise, when caterwauling kids wandered
from back bedrooms to paw at his things and ask nosy questions, or
strangers suddenly showed up from nowhere – moments like these Hank
found himself wondering what the hell turn he had taken in life to
end up where he was. In a moist tin box dense with the smell of cat
piss, choked with water-spotted furniture, shoeboxes coughing out
forests of paper, and flaccid houseplants that looked the way he
felt.”
Patrick
works at a mink farm for the gruff Tin Dorsay and often spends the
weekend in Seattle at the home of one Mama T, a woman who helps
runaways. Her son, Shadow, is Patrick’s occasional lover. Patrick
bears the weight of being Luntz’s son. While his introverted
character doesn’t offer but glimpses of what he carries inside, he
expresses his trauma in other ways, such as his queasiness when it
comes to killing the minks he helps breed. “Does it hurt?”
he asks his boss Tin, who explains that the animals are put to sleep
with CO2 gas. “[T]here ain’t no such a thing as a nice way to
kill something,” Tin says. “You can look at it any way you
want, but that’s the God’s honest truth. It don’t matter if
it’s a mink or a mouse or a mosquito. One minute there’s a life
in front of you, and the next, it’s gone. By your hand.”
Like
many residents of Ash Falls, Patrick feels confined by his own life
and longs to leave town. These visions of freedom become entangled
with his ambivalent sentiments toward his father:
“There
were times when the news excited him, the vision of his father free
of his own cage, wandering the countryside like a nomad, making his
way, perhaps, back to Ash Falls, crouched in an open boxcar or
thumbing for a ride along some lost highway. Even better, somewhere
no one would ever find him. Other times (…) Patrick could only see
his father as just another loose mink, slinking along the perimeter
of the fence somewhere out there in the snow, searching for an
opening or a deep rut where he could slip through and run free. Free,
out into the openness of the roadway and a distant light, or directly
into the path of an oncoming truck.”
The
above is only a part of the vast map of fully realized characters and
stories contained in Ash Falls, a novel that starts as a rural
noir (which would explain why it has been compared to Daniel
Woodrell’s work) but becomes a dark portrait of small town life in
the vein of Kent Haruf – albeit grittier. But a rural novel is also
a novel about the land, which Read captures in prose that is both
lush and atmospheric, as the somber beauty of the Pacific Northwest
helps set the tone for the story.
Read’s
first book, The Lyncher in Me (2008), is a memoir about
discovering his great-grandfather’s role in the lynching of three
innocent men in 1920. In Ash Falls, Read once again explores
buried trauma and the price of reckoning with the past but in a
fictional work that hopefully is the first of many.
Gonzalo
Baeza
is a writer born in Texas, raised in Chile, and currently living in
Shepherdstown, West Virginia. His books have been published in the
U.S., Spain and Chile, and his fiction has appeared in Boulevard,
Goliad, Estados Hispanos de América, Tintas,
and The
Texas Review,
among others.
