Josh Ritter’s Novel of
Appalachia
By STEPHEN KING
Josh Ritter
BRIGHT’S PASSAGE
By Josh Ritter
193 pp. The Dial Press. $22.
Henry Bright is pretty much your ordinary
20th-century West Virginia farmboy, with one notable exception: when he winds
up in the World War I trenches in France, he begins hearing voices.
Actually, it’s just one voice — or Voice —
that speaks from various unlikely sources. Sometimes it comes from the ground;
sometimes it comes from a goat; most commonly it comes from the mouth of a
horse Henry buys at auction when the war is over. It has a certain credibility,
this voice, because it saves him several times during the waning months of
warfare — once from poisoned water, once from a German patrol as Henry lies
hidden beneath a comrade’s corpse and once, on the day of the Armistice, from a
fatal bullet in the conflict’s last engagement. This is Henry’s angel, and it
prefaces most of its commands with that most angelic of imperatives: be not
afraid.
That much of the angel’s guidance turns
out to be comically bad advice shouldn’t surprise us, since it actually comes
from Henry himself, by way of Josh Ritter, the alt-folk/alt-rock
singer-songwriter who on his most recent album gave us a wickedly revisionist
version of “Stagger Lee” called “Folk Bloodbath.” The song is a crazy bonbon of
hilarity with sadness at the center. “Bright’s Passage,” Ritter’s debut novel,
has much the same stylistic effect.
Henry’s angel suggests he marry Rachel,
the little girl who lives down the lane, so Henry does, partly as an act of
rescue; her father is a mentally unstable veteran of the Philippine-American
conflict who still wears his old uniform and styles himself “the Colonel.” Her
brothers are idiots; one malevolent, the other just . . . well, an idiot.
The fact that Rachel is Henry’s first
cousin doesn’t seem to concern either Henry or his angel, who — speaking
through Henry’s horse — officiates at the jackleg marriage ceremony in a
backwoods farmyard. When Rachel becomes pregnant, Henry’s angel tells him that
the child will not only be a boy, it will be the Future King of Heaven (caps
Ritter’s), destined to replace Jesus Christ. J. C., the angel opines, has done
a pretty lousy job as the Prince of Peace, given the number of dead in the
recent conflict (no argument there).
After Henry’s young bride dies in childbirth,
the angel instructs Henry to bury her sans coffin and then set fire to the
cabin where the Brights lived during their short marriage. Henry does as
instructed, touching off a terrible forest fire from which he flees, feeding
the putative Future King of Heaven with goat’s milk and sleeping in virulent
poison ivy that almost kills the boy. The Colonel — elderly, addled and
violently opposed to the use of verbal contractions — pursues them with his
idiot sons, and thereby hangs an extremely slight tale.
Slight, but not without charm. In his
songwriting persona, where he is clearly more comfortable, Ritter has
demonstrated a real talent for storytelling, most notably on his latest album,
“So Runs the World Away” (the title is taken from a speech Hamlet makes to
Horatio). In the best of the ballads collected there, an explorer makes a
doomed journey to the North Pole aboard a boat whose name contains another
literary allusion, the Annabel Lee. But the ability to write narrative songs
doesn’t always translate into the ability to write prose, any more than the
ability to write good prose translates into the ability to write good verse, a
fact I know from my own reams of poetry, most of it abysmal.
For this reason I approached “Bright’s
Passage” with distrust, but I found much to delight me. The story, woven into a
kind of pigtail, is a lot of fun. The chapters narrating Henry’s postwar
adventures intertwine, tightly but without authorial fanfare, with his
experiences in the trenches. These are certainly horrific enough to make a man
believe that some higher force must be looking out for him: how else could he
possibly continue to live as legions of bullets fly around him and his friends
are dying on all sides? To keep the now-and-then narrative from becoming too
predictable, Ritter tosses in an occasional update on the progress of the
contraction-hating Colonel and his sons. And there’s always that plot-thickening
forest fire at the heels of our semi-clueless hero and his totally clueless
pursuers.
At its best, “Bright’s Passage” shines
with a compressed lyricism that recalls Ray Bradbury in his prime. When Henry,
his talking horse — a kind of holy Mr. Ed — and the Future King of Heaven leave
the woods and enter a small town, Ritter writes: “It seemed a tidy place of
dappled white houses and American flags. . . . Even the trees here seemed to
have a kind of deep green and prepossessing prosperity that the trees of the
forest could have no share in.” Recalling his mother’s death, Henry remembers
“a windstorm that made the trees bow to one another like ballroom dancers.”
More striking still are Henry’s memories of life in the trenches, some of which
compare favorably to the prose in Mark Helprin’s “Soldier of the Great War”:
“Artillery passed high above their heads in singsong trajectories that merged
and lifted with one another into strange musical chords, like cats crossing
pump organs.”
Given such tasty language, it might be
mean-spirited to wish for a little more texture and depth, villains a little
more villainous and many fewer adverbs, which are the beginning writer’s
plaintive way of asking, Am I getting through to you? Rachel asks about
marriage expectantly. Henry replies expectoratingly. His aunt looks at him
blisteringly. And — least palatable of all — “Her voice came smally.”
These and frequent lapses into
unbelievability (Henry’s mother attempting to bury her sister in frozen ground
while her young son holds a rifle on the evil Colonel; hotel porters continuing
to ticket luggage as a raging wildfire bears down on the hotel where fleeing
refugees have taken shelter) mar what might have been, in more experienced
hands, a little sweetheart of a book. I’ve asked myself several times if I
would have recommended publishing “Bright’s Passage” were I the editor on whose
desk it landed and were its author not known, and beloved, in a sister field of
the arts. It’s a question I’m glad I never had to answer. Certainly the
decision to publish was made easier by Ritter’s proven track record as a
songwriter.
Whichever way I decided, I would have
advised Ritter to start work on another book immediately, building on what he
learned in the writing of “Bright’s Passage.” This is the work of a gifted
novelist, but the size of that gift has yet to be determined. One thing that is
sure: Ritter has not, as yet, fully unwrapped it.
Stephen King’s most
recent book is a collection of four long stories, “Full Dark, No Stars.”
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