There’s a point in Ron Rash’s latest novel The Caretaker where you understand with sickening clarity just how badly things might turn out for the book’s protagonists. Like pitching over the crest of a rollercoaster, the remainder of Rash’s novel must be read at high speed and with white knuckles before you can catch your breath.
Rash, now 70, is one of America’s most respected novelists, poets and short story writers. He has won the O Henry Prize three times and his 2008 novel, Serena, was a PEN/Faulkner finalist. In The Caretaker, Rash returns to a favourite place and era – North Carolina in 1951. Jacob Hampton has been drafted to fight in Korea, leaving behind his pregnant teenage wife, Naomi. His parents, well-to-do local business people, have disinherited him following his elopement with Naomi, so Jacob turns to his childhood friend, Blackburn, to look out for Naomi while he is in Korea. Blackburn himself is shunned by the community because of his facial disfigurement from childhood polio, but he is given a job as caretaker of the local graveyard, where he works alone.
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When Jacob is injured and sent home from the war, his parents form a plan that involves a despicable deception and relies on several people protecting their secret. But a secret is the literary equivalent of a gun produced in the opening act of a play: it must go off before long. This secret adds an almost unbearable tension to the narrative and Rash cleverly uses the smallest details to make several outcomes possible.
Rash has been compared to John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy and his spare prose and deference to nature’s brutality recall both authors, but I was also reminded of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These here, and her protagonist Bill Furlong, the good man trying to do the right thing in a community that prefers to look away and maintain the status quo.
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The book is a beautifully written fable about how seeing the difference between people instead of our commonality is a recipe for misery and disaster, and how people of means and power can try to bend a person’s integrity to their will. But it’s also a perfectly executed tale of love and friendship, and how not everything can be bought.
