David Joy is not Flannery O’Connor
Note: This is an analysis of David Joy’s book The Line That Held Us, not a review. As such, it is full of spoilers.
I discovered David Joy when I asked a friend to recommend some “dark” fiction. A friend recommended Joy and I read Where All Light Tends to Go and then The Weight of This World. And yes I loved the prose, but I also loved the stories. I loved the vivid descriptions of the mountains and life in them, and as for the people living out their childhood trauma and poverty, making bad decisions and facing awful consequences, well, it was the meth. There’s a certain hopelessness about addiction that made it all seem very logical, in terms of life and story. It’s tragedy of the highest order, with a message for our times. And always in these books, at some point, often in the last moment, love or beauty reached through for these characters.
In The Line That Held Us, though, although in terms of verisimilitude to life the story and characters worked, for me the book didn’t work as a piece of fiction. The violence extends to torture, and I reached a point where I just wanted it to be over for everyone. Still, I hoped for a certain resolution, and stuck with it, skimming I admit over the more gruesome aspects, a body decomposing in a fruit cellar where a woman is being held hostage. But there’s no relief in this book. No flash of light in the last moment of a mother’s love, as in Where All Light Tends to Go. Nada. Evil wins. I admit, I wanted Flannery O’Connor from this book, and I had reason to want that, though maybe I also had an early warning of how this book would deviate from her work.
The book opens with Darl Moody trespassing on land where he knows the owner is away in the hope of poaching a deer. It is out of season and not his land. There is another poacher on the property, Carol “Sissy” Brewer, who is digging up ginseng. Darl mistakes the hunched Sissy for a boar and accidentally shoots and kills him. He knows immediately he has killed the wrong man, the brother of Dwayne Brewer, a notoriously violent man, and so he convinces his best friend Calvin Hooper to help him hide the body, burying it on Calvin’s land.
In the second chapter, the book announces its affinity with Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” We meet Dwayne Brewer, as he harasses a rich kid bully in a Walmart bathroom, holding a gun to his head and making him foul his expensive sneakers in the toilet. And he says, closely paraphrasing the serial killer the Misfit from O’Connor’s story: “the kid might’ve been all right if it had been a gun to his head every second of his life.” OK, I thought, so that’s who we’re dealing with. A man who would shoot a grandmother.
Dwayne Brewer is also a religious guy, we learn later, in the Old Testament, warped, “Christ-haunted” fashion of O’Connor. But I kept waiting for O’Connor’s grace. I kept waiting for grace, overt and crashing in on the characters. Not grace for Brewer-as-Misfit, but for Darl Moody or Calvin Hooper, the other two characters whose perspective we follow, characters who can’t sleep because of what they’ve done but don’t come clean either. I waited for Dwayne Brewer, like the Misfit, to be a catalyst for grace for the others, who I assumed were the heroes of this book.
Dwayne Brewer quickly figures out what Darl Moody has done to his brother, though he doesn’t know who helped him and he doesn’t know what they did with the body. His vengeance is swift and incredibly brutal. We get the scene from Dwayne’s perspective, all rage and cruelty. An eye for an eye. If Darl mistook Sissy for a pig, Dwayne slaughters Darl like a hog as well, lingering long enough to get the Calvin Hooper’s name.
In this way, by the code and primary message of the book, Darl Moody fails the test. The primary question for each character is Who do you love so much you would give your own life for that person? For Dwayne, that person is his brother Sissy, whom he protected from their father’s cruelty and abuse and tried to protect from the world. Dwayne’s ongoing sacrifice on behalf of Sissy is the source of rage and love that drives all his actions now. His terrible, violent, merciless, rage-fueled actions. And Darl could suffer to protect Calvin, but he does not. He chooses a quick death instead (the death is inevitable) and is gone.
As for Calvin, he doesn’t understand the stakes. He immediately turns over Sissy’s body to Dwayne, albeit at gunpoint. Then he somewhat inexplicably lies to the detective about what happened, protecting himself but also Dwayne. Somehow he doesn’t realize that Dwayne will not come back for him but for the person he loves most, his girlfriend Angie Moss. And yet, when he does, Dwayne realizes that yes, he would give his own life for Angie. Angie is innocent, lovely, and loving. Angie is everything. We as readers feel this, too. Do. Not. Let. Anything. Happen. To. Angie. This is where David Joy began to lose me. Because this is where the point of view turned deeper to Dwayne Brewer: his backstory, his twisted faith, his relentless cruelty and grotesqueness. This is when I realized it was truly Dwayne Brewer’s story. It was the Misfit who was the “hero” of the book.
In O’Connor’s story, the Misfit and others like him, perhaps most notably the club-footed hoodlum in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” are catalysts for grace. Both “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “The Lame Shall Enter First” end in terrible tragedy, with the loss of life in the former and loss of an innocent son in the latter, but the grandmother and the puffed up father see the truth and have their epiphany. The villains remain villainous, but the main characters change.
One could argue that Calvin has his epiphany, too. He realizes and acts so as to give his life for Angie, and they are both spared. He realizes his great love for her. But really? It wasn’t like he didn’t love her up to this point, or betrayed her love, or needed somehow to be taught this lesson. His error was somehow misreading the depth of depravity of Dwayne Brewer. But anyway, Calvin’s realization is not what is driving this book. The last chapter, as we follow Dwayne Brewer’s escape, drives that home again.
Dwayne Brewer finds beauty, stunning beauty, in the natural world of the Appalachian mountains. But given the ending, I’m left to conclude it is not healing beauty. He retreats deep into the mountains, to a place where he and Sissy found some joy for a brief period as children. But in a final scene, we see that he is still the Misfit.
Come spring, as people return to the trails, Dwayne scopes out a pair of campers. He considers for a moment going to them and offering them some piece of twisted theology, “good news.” But then, it is clear, he decides to kill them instead. This couple did nothing to him. They do not even threaten his safety. But this is where the story has taken us. It’s as if the book No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy belonged to Chighur instead of Sheriff Bell. Yes, there’s evil in the world, and it can be relentless as hell. The only thing that tempers it is good, and mercy. I suppose I’m supposed to feel some sympathy for Dwayne, given his deep love for Sissy. But what that love drives him to do, what it makes of him, alienates me completely. Throughout the book, and especially at the end, I want him stopped. That he is not, even after his purpose in the book is exhausted, feels like nihilism.
