To borrow some terms from Wendell Berry, it might seem that a certain cultural ascendancy presently belongs more to “boomers” than to “stickers.” A “boomer” in this sense means not a person of a certain generation but one who chases the economic “boom” wherever he or she may or must, from place to place, until one of two things happens. In one, much-idealized scenario, the opportunity arises to settle down in a locale that affords the very life of which the boomer has dreamt.
In the other (perhaps more common) scenario, the chaser of the dream, having run out of resources with which to make shift, lands at a terminus not so much chosen as accepted at fate’s hand. This stuckness is different from that of the “sticker” who consciously commits to a place of origin.
The sticker adds two more scenarios to our picture: He or she either never leaves or, like Odysseus, having departed for what seem necessary reasons, makes all efforts to end the journey in the same place it began. Where journey and return make for a successful narrative arc, dwelling is more difficult to tell compellingly.
So literature rarely speaks of stickers. When it does, we can often pick up a whiff of sticky sentiment about the tone, a low-lit glow like that golden-hour sun cast over the ingenue’s shoulder in a cliched Instagram photo.
That fickle light is thankfully all but absent in Tony Woodlief’s novel We Shall Not All Sleep, a story that carves away all that is tired in contemporary treatment of the theme of home and makes it fresh. Under the evident influence of writers of faith like Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison, as well as more ancient strains of biblical and mythical influence, Woodlief revives our ability to see our golden hours as just that: breath-catching moments captured and lifted out of a river of suffering, little rescues and salvations hard-won after so many battles.
The novel’s central figure and deepest mystery is its narrator’s father, Ray Waterson, a Vietnam veteran with Native American heritage and uncanny powers on the natural and preternatural levels. Whether Ray is more to be feared due to his reputation as a soldier, his mental-health struggles after battle’s trauma, or his quasi-mystical abilities as a dowser, it’s clear that this fear, for Daniel, is mixed with love, hate, admiration, emulation, aversion, and hope: How can an ordinary boy ever measure up to such a figure? How can the son of such a man learn to tell his own burdens apart from the weight of those he inherits?
The stakes of the question, from the first pages, rise to life and death: Daniel is out for a drive with Ray when the latter’s truck strikes and kills one of Daniel’s schoolmates. It is pure accident; Ray, though known to drink, is implied to have been sober that morning. But the aftermath of the death seems to awaken some spiritual sight in Daniel himself. Daniel becomes able to see the other child, dead, who appears now not exactly as a friend, but for some mysterious reason as a constant companion. Is this haunting an irredeemable horror—or can it, by the flow of some subterranean river, become possible to understand as a gift?
To arrive at anything like an understanding, it is necessary for the reader to know what it means not just to live in a community but in this community of Hickory Shore, North Carolina, on the Crow River: a place where open, overt struggles for survival and status have obscured the buried sufferings of those who were driven from the land and those who were made to live and work it while being denied the fruits of their labor and the dignity of citizenship. One of the novel’s achievements is the way that it unfolds this centuries-long story with both clarity and subtlety, establishing a clear feel for right and wrong while casting no irreproachable heroes and very few villains.
If the narrative has a disputable point, it is in these very few villains, who may seem just a shade too obviously nasty and self-interested, their virtuous (and Berry-reminiscent) opponents too obviously on the side of justice. But for myself as a reader, having grown up in a small Southern place, I might be tempted to counter that anyone who finds these men unbelievable has simply never met any. I have met some. I imagine Woodlief has, too.
But Ray Waterson, for all the damage he does, is no villain. He is a complex man (though this is a term some people now use for “villain,” so I want to be clear that I am using it in the sympathetic sense). He is a sufferer and a survivor of trauma, whose trauma nevertheless cannot succeed in facilely explaining all that he subsequently does. His anointing and his haunting seem to be one and the same: Ray carries a “burden” so intense that his wife will go to drastic lengths to prevent their son from also carrying it—but also a “homeward calling” that causes him to move against the stream in mysterious ways.
While we are immersed in the swiftly flowing currents of this tale, we may realize that this novel, which reveals to us a North Carolina rocked by the deleterious effects of economic exploitation on the land’s ability to clear its own floodwaters and keep communities safe, must not only have been written long before the aftermath of Hurricane Helene but conceived of years before the storm. If we were to fall into the commonplace slipstream of the argument that literature’s role in human life is meant to prevent suffering, we might be tempted to cry out that this work therefore comes too late: too late to warn us, too late to prevent damage now irreversibly done.
But this impulse would stem from a misapprehension of what art is meant to do. Rather, literature—like all art—helps us to come to terms with suffering. It does not necessarily prevent or forestall; rather, it helps us live with what we cannot escape. To read the illegible, speak the unsayable: to find ourselves less alone in our very experience of aloneness, and yes, perhaps, also to see better so that we will then have motive to act better.
But—as Daniel himself finds—vision cannot be had without the willingness to endure it in its wholeness, its context and its consequences. And, accepting this, Ray finds that he also has it in him to serve the good, even from within the depths of his torment. His outstretched arms during his trancelike episodes do, after all, recall the shape of the Cross—which is powerful to save.
And as the story’s sympathy expands outward and outward without losing its center, we find more and more that needs and cries out for saving: not only Waterson, but the most vulnerable in his community; not only Daniel, but a heretofore erased legacy of lives lost and not yet honored in the dignity they deserve.
Readers of works like Robinson’s Housekeeping, Steven Wingate’s Of Fathers and Fire, and Nathan Poole’s Father, Brother, Keeper will find themselves pulled in not only by the novel’s sculptorly prose but by its thematic preoccupations: family, community, history; memory and forgetting; forgiveness and reconciliation. Among Woodlief’s many achievements in this story, one of the most salient may be its rescue of words like home, place, and community from the realm of the soothing anodyne—the restoration of their sense of intensity, urgency, and seriousness.
Image via Pickpik
