Book review: 'Serena' from IHT

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Book review: 'Serena'

Reviewed by Janet Maslin

Wednesday, October 8, 2008 , International Herald Tribune

Serena By Ron Rash 371 pages. Ecco. $24.95.

'Serena" is Ron Rash's fourth novel. For those unfamiliar with the elegantly fine-tuned voice of this Appalachian poet and storyteller, a writer whose reputation has been largely regional despite an O. Henry Prize and other honors, it will prompt instant interest in his first, second and third.

('세레나'는 론 래쉬의 4번째 소설이다. 오 헨리 상과 다른 상들에도 불구하고 지역적인 명성만을 얻는데 그친, 애팔래치안 출신의 시인이며 작가인 저자의 우아하면서 잘 조율된 목소리에 익숙하지 않은 사람들에게, 이 책은 저자의 기존 3개작품에 대해 갑작스런 관심을 촉발시킬 것이다)

It opens with a paragraph too good to paraphrase: "When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father's estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton's child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton's heart."

(책은 다른말로 바꿔쓰기에는 너무 좋은 다음 문장으로시작한다: "펨버톤이 아버지의 재산을 처분하면서 머물렀던 보스톤에서의 3개월이 지난 후에 북 캐롤라이나 산으로 돌아올때, 기차플랫폼에서 기다리는 사람들중에는, 펨버튼의 아이를 임신한 한 젊은 여성이 있었다. 그녀는 아버지와 함께였는데, 아버지는 자신의 초라한 프록코트안에 그날 아침 일찍부터 세심한 주의를 가지고 날을 연마하여, 펨버튼의 심장에 깊숙히 꽂힐 수도 있는 칼 한자루를 가지고 있었다".)

As that demonstrates, Rash throws a mean lightning bolt. He also carefully lays the groundwork for his larger story. A world of information is prefigured in those few sentences. We learn that Pemberton is a city-bred heir deigning to live amid country folk. We see that he has been unforgivably careless with the locals. (He cannot recall the pregnant girl's name.) Immediately there is more news: Pemberton has just married the book's title character, "an unexpected bonus from his time in Boston."

(이야기가 전개되면서, 래쉬(저자)는 비열한 번갯불을 날린다. 그는 또한 주의깊게 더 큰 이야기르 위한 발판을 마련한다. 몇개의 문장안에 산더미같은 정보를 미리 배치한다. 독자는 펨버톤이 도시태생의 상속자로 지방사람들과 같이 살 것이라는 것을 알게된다. 독자는 또한 펨버톤이 용서할 수 없을 정도로 지방사람들에게 부주의해왔다는 것도 알게된다.(그는 임신한 소녀의 이름조차 기억하지 못한다) 즉시 더 많은 뉴스가 전개된다: 펨버톤은 " 그가 보스톤에 머물면서 뜻하지 않게 얻은 보너스"라고 할 만한 책의 타이틀 주인공과 막 결혼했다.)

Before his reader can wonder what kind of bonus Serena Pemberton is, Rash stages something quick and shocking: a fatal confrontation between the pregnant woman's father and her callous seducer. Almost as startling as the outcome of the fight is the eerily calm way in which Rash describes it. And then, with the outraged father dead, Serena defines herself with a single gesture. She extracts the knife that Pemberton plunged into the man, hands it to his now-orphaned daughter, Rachel Harmon, and advises Rachel to sell it.

"That money will help when the child is born," Serena says coolly. "It's all you'll ever get from my husband and me."

With bone-chilling aplomb, linguistic grace and the piercing fatalism of an Appalachian ballad, Rash lets the Pembertons' new union generate ripple after ripple of astonishment. Pemberton controls a vast lumber empire, and Serena quickly makes herself its regal overseer.

Soon she is touring the Pemberton fief astride the white Arabian stallion that was her wedding gift, and delivering pronouncements on how the workers ought to be treated. "Serena" takes place during the Depression. It greatly pleases Serena that labor is cheap and easily replaceable. And as for providing the men with such amenities as electricity, "they'll work harder if they live like Spartans," she says.

Rash creates an awestruck Greek chorus of Carolina highlanders to marvel at a tall, brisk businesswoman who seems to have stepped out of Ayn Rand's imagination. Among this novel's many wonders are Rash's fine ear for idiomatic, laconic talk and the startling contrast he creates between Serena and her new neighbors. The local lay preacher sees her as an omen. "It's in the Revelations," he insists. "Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants."

Serena has clear ambitions: to log the landscape bare, keep Pemberton land from being made part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and move on to Brazil and its mahogany forests. Her inability to sleep well is not this book's only intimation of Lady Macbeth. In a novel punctuated by monstrous logging accidents, described with a minimalism that reflects the workers' terrible resignation, she schemes and thrives.

But in her quiet, impoverished way Rachel Harmon is also thriving. More ominously for the Pemberton marriage, so is her illegitimate baby. After a sequence in which Rachel, sick with fever, manages to rescue the little boy from the same illness by making an arduous trip to see a doctor named Harbin, the doctor comments: "You must love that child dear as life."

The child's survival is precarious. After all, this is a region where the Pembertons' cruelly indifferent doctor, to whom Rash gives the name Cheney, asks his employers whether each injured logger is worth saving. And the perils in this story are ratcheted ever higher as it becomes clear that the Pembertons will simply dispense with anyone who inconveniences them.

"Serena" sustains its haunting power until it goes one little step too far. When it finally lets Serena give full voice to her ambitions, they do the book an injustice. "The world is ripe, and we'll pluck it like an apple from a tree," says the woman who has wielded such subtle power throughout most of the story. It is a backhanded credit to the author's portrait of Serena that no literal acts of greed and vengefulness do justice to the free-floating, otherworldly menace she has represented.

"Serena" is both drama and parable. As the book's homespun philosophers try to name intangibles, like love, courage and air, they also grasp the universal, imperial darkness that the Pembertons' ruthless game plan embodies. ( — Reviewed by Janet Maslin