Serena by Ron Rash

Reading Serena after the Magician’s Elephant is like reading The Silence of the Lambs after Goodnight Moon. Ok, I haven’t read the Silence of the Lambs, too scary for me, but you know what I mean. I read Serena for a new book club I am hoping to join.

I was drawn into this story right away, and that is sad, because the characters are really despicable. Serena is absolutely starved for redeeming qualities – don’t look for them, she has none. For the first five minutes of the book, you are thinking oh, how nice, this lovely newlywed couple is on a train to their new home in North Carolina. But then, there is a slight sense of doom, and, before you know it someone is dead. I will spare you the gory details, but Ron Rash does not.

At first I had the feeling Serena was going to be like an Ayn Rand character, Dagny Taggert, or the female Howard Roark. Her husband, George Pemberton, unfortunately displays none of those qualities, and, in the end, is just unbelievably. We debated in the book club if he was really stupid, or just resigned to his fate – either way he comes out flat. There is a backstory for Serena that is never fully explained, and, rather than making her more intriguing, it just gets annoying. Her character is about as one-dimensional as they come.

There are qualities of the book that I really did enjoy. In the historical context, Serena and her husband are lumber barons, stripping the land of North Carolina, not long after the stock market crash. The laborers are desperate for work, but, at the same time, the government and some powerful allies (the Vanderbilts, Horace Kephart, Roosevelt) are planning to enforce eminent domain to gain back the land for the National Park System. Besides the very interesting history of the park creation, I learned the many ways a man can die cutting down a tree!

Having said that, the drama is fast-paced, and Ron Rash really is a beautiful writer, when he’s describing the rugged mountains of North Carolina. There are engaging characters – Rachel, the mother of Pemberton’s bastard child, the Greek chorus of workers who comment on their paranoid bosses, and a few other nice people, mostly all dead by the end (including the completely gratuitous killing of an old widow woman who never bothered anyone!). Not sure what else to say. I heard they’re making a movie of this (of course they are, can’t have too many psychopathic female lumber barons on screen!) Angelina Jolie is allegedly playing the part, and, for some reason, I think that’s just perfect.