Some conflicts of interest are so massive and heavy and all-pervasive that they double-back on themselves and become, instead of disqualifications, the opposite. They are perverse qualifications. The closeness to the subject bestows expertise, not favoritism. And so it is that I consider three books about West Virginia.
I was born there, and raised there, and I went to college there. No matter where I am living, I still consider myself a West Virginian. I might as well go whole-hog and get a funky tattoo in the shape of the state. If I do that, I’ll have the tattoo artist apply his inks to the area of skin in the rough vicinity of my heart.
I haven’t always felt this way. If you had encountered me in my first big-city job — Columbus, Ohio — you might not have known where I hailed from, because I didn’t talk much about it. In her amazing 2007 novel “Strange As This Weather Has Been” (Shoemaker & Hoard), Ann Pancake describes what happens to kids from West Virginia: “Growing up here, you get the message very early on that your place is more backwards than anywhere else in America and anybody worth much will get out as soon as they can, and that doesn’t come only from outside.” It has just been in the past several years that I’ve let the West Virginia part of me — the part that I kept coiled up inside, like a lariat hung on a hook in an abandoned barn — unspool, bit by bit, until by now, you might likely discover that I’m a West Virginian within minutes of meeting me. You’ll discover it because I’ll tell you.
Everybody comes from somewhere. So when I claim distinctive qualities for my homeplace — that’s a word I don’t hear much outside the Mountain State, but it really does its job, doesn’t it, in evoking a feeling as well as a geographical location? — I’m aware of the possibility of pretentiousness. Other states also are ablaze with great scenic beauty but marred by poverty and lack of educational opportunities for far too many of their citizens; other states, too, have suffered from absentee landownership and a long parade of corrupt governors.
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I am not alone, though, in thinking West Virginia occupies a sad and special niche. In his book “Coal River” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), a passionate indictment of the strip-mining industry, non-fiction writer Michael Shnayerson makes his case for the peculiar status of West Virginia: “This would never happen in rural Connecticut, Maine, Northern California, Washington State, or any other place where such devastation would stir outcry, and people with money and power would stop it. But Appalachia is a land unto itself, cut off by its mountains from the East and the Midwest. Its people are for the most part too poor and too cowed after a century of harsh treatment by King Coal to think they can stop their world from being blasted away.”
One of the books I have mentioned is fiction; the other, fact. You need both, I think, to get at the essence of West Virginia, to dig out the diamond that waits at the bottom of the heap of coal. You need Shnayerson’s true story about a crusading lawyer who fought not only the coal companies but also the federal government, because administrators with the latter weren’t enforcing laws that could have stopped the big strip-mining machine. Slicing off the tops of mountains to get to the coal is cheaper, frankly, than tunneling down into the earth to get it. Never mind that the lopped-off parts of the mountains end up choking streams and laying waste to wide stretches of the prettiest earth God ever made.
Fact needs some help, though, in conveying the pathos and poetry of ruined landscapes and ruined lives. Pancake’s book is the best I’ve ever read about my state. It is filled with wisdom and fire and grace, filled with people who work hard and make mistakes and love and hate each other, but who, most of all, love their homeplace, and grieve when the coal companies rip away its beauty with their big machines: “Our mountains are not like the Western ones, those jagged, awesome ones, your eyes always pulled to their tops,” a character muses. “But that is the difference, I decided. In the West, the mountains are mostly horizon. We live in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.”
Both books are about fighting, and fighting can get tedious. If you prefer resignation, there is “Knockemstiff” (Doubleday), a new short story collection by Donald Ray Pollock. These bleak tales take place in southern Ohio, but if you know the area, you know that southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky all sort of run together. So Pollock is writing about West Virginia even when he’s writing about Ohio, just as Pancake is writing about Ohio even when she’s writing about West Virginia. Pollock’s stories are filled with sad-eyed men and roughed-up women. Pancake and Pollock both stand on the same grim ground, but Pancake’s looking up, while Pollock’s gaze stays level.
I’m pretty particular about books on my homeplace. I know the land, I know the people, so I expect a lot. And these books deliver. They are bleak and bitter and heartbroken, with only a faint smudge of pink at the edges that might be pure sunrise but also could be the light reflecting off the top of a trailer. They hand you the truth in a rusty mug and dare you to drink. Do it.
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