It’s sleepy time down South, and Eugene Watney and his older brother, Bill, are kicking back, enjoying the summer of 1969. Enter Ligeia, an errant vixen from Daytona come to Asheville, N.C., for schooling in propriety by her puritan relatives.
Ron Rash’s sultry “The Risen” is a bildungsroman, a thriller, a period piece. It’s well-constructed and absorbing, if not quite riveting.
Ligeia is indeed a sight. Here, Gene recalls the boys approaching her at the local swimming hole:
Ecco ($27.99).
“Her long red hair set off her aqua eyes and unblemished complexion. Close up, she looked younger, close to my age than Bill’s. Bright beads circled her neck. Love beads, I knew they were called. Affixed to the beads was a penny-size peace symbol. She raised a hand and tucked her dripping hair behind her ears, exposing a pale crescent of breast. I look away, feeling my face flush.”
Great detail here, depicting a key figure but also conjuring the zeitgeist. Mr. Rash name checks the times effectively as Gene looks back, realizing the most important tune of the period was The Doors’ “The End.”
Ligeia is anything but a puritan. She stretches the boundaries wherever she goes, it seems. And she’s promiscuous, a quality the Watney boys value and exploit. Ligeia ends up schooling both boys in sex, but the conformist, more ambitious Bill opts out, scared to jeopardize his impending marriage. Eugene, the lonelier, less scheming boy, has a harder time letting go. Ligeia, after all, is his rite of passage.
Meanwhile, Grandfather Watney, a tyrant and a pillar of the community, is a doctor with a direct line to the pharmaceuticals that float Ligeia’s sensual boat. Raiding the medicine cabinet of their cruel elder becomes a contest for the brothers, eager to please their Florida siren with their chemical booty.
That’s part of the frosting of Mr. Rash’s lucid and stylish book, a smoothly written, occasionally torrid small-town noir that I finished feeling it may signify more than it delivers. I can’t say precisely what keeps it from lifting my boat, only that I wish it had somehow been thicker, especially given its material. The characterization seems thin, subordinate to the skill of the plot.
At the same time, Mr. Rash is great at atmosphere. He’s also effective in building the tension at the heart of “The Risen,” so named because Ligeia disappears mysteriously only to resurface 20 years later.
How Ligeia vanished is the mystery, and its unfolding is enthralling, complete with villains, including dogged police. Narrated by failed writer Eugene, an alcoholic with a painful past, it’s Mr. Rash’s meditation on sibling rivalry, the power of family and the pull of sensuality. It’s artfully written, if perhaps too sparely. It occasionally evokes William Faulkner (and Harper Lee; Mr. Rash’s character Nebo is analog to Boo Radley in Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”). But it also brings to mind “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry’s Southern noir pop hit of 1967. Like “The Risen,” Gentry’s memorable single is about a girl lost to the waters.
The key storyline is the brothers’, their relationship is problematic early on.
“That Bill would become a surgeon had been decreed when he was in elementary school. ‘Look at how he trims the fat off that roast,’ Grandfather told our mother. ‘A natural-born surgeon and destined to be one of the best, just as I and his father would have been. And you, Eugene,’ my grandfather added, smiling as he turned to me, ‘you’re not even using the correct hand. I don’t know of a single left-handed surgeon. Southpaws see things differently, which isn’t what you want from someone wielding a scalpel.’”
Mr. Rash has said this novel is an homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky, a connoisseur of guilt and responsibility. Like that Russian master, Mr. Rash keeps the mystery going, the questions unresolved.
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer living in Cleveland.
First Published: September 18, 2016, 4:00 a.m.