Against the Country

Starred review from November 3, 2014
Metcalf, essayist and former literary editor of Harper’s, debuts with a virtuosic tour de force of Southern malfeasance. The largely plotless narrative records
a rural boyhood in Goochland County, Va., the
narrator’s relationship with his ever-vengeful father, and the rigors of farm-life. Sprawling and underpopulated, Goochland is the setting for the indignities of grade school, boozy first love, rejection of “the killer-God idea,” and salvation in literature. But even amid the requisite
episodes of racial disharmony and religious fervor, Metcalf’s storytelling often digresses, and, in short sections with titles like “I Feared the Corn,” he obsesses over every particular of the land. From blackberries, chickens, and ringworm to meditations on Jehovah’s Witnesses and an appendix on dogs, the all-American life is lovingly deconstructed in a passionate screed that feels like a confession from the tortured heart of the South itself. But even in envying Thomas Jefferson “his idyllic hallucinations” and damning “this flytrap of a county,” Metcalf composes a relentlessly articulate paean to the American project. In the end, this isn’t a Southern novel, because it isn’t exactly a novel. It’s more like man’s revenge on God for the world he made—and anyone who disagrees must be a Yankee.

November 15, 2014
A boy's school years in rural Virginia are marked by poverty, poultry, school bus torments and a brutish father, all of which would one day inspire him to tell his story with a ponderous postmodernist flair. Labyrinthine sentences and metafictional antics make it difficult to separate style from substance in this variously humorous and bilious first novel. The narrator looks back from a distance of 30 years to the time in the early 1980s when his father uprooted the family of five from town life and planted them in a ramshackle house to endure a country life that's a darker take on the faux-gothic of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. There's much more than a nasty thing in the woodshed. The boy endures snakes, wasps, ticks, bullies and frequent disciplinary thrashings. Two long sections concern the daily horrors of the "yellow beast," the "yellow metal scow" that ferries him to and from school for frequent fights; and there's a possibly symbolic tale of his chickens' efforts to fly the coop. Elsewhere Metcalf focuses on the father and narrator-son. Along with his mean dad's physical and psychological oppression, there are references to his former scholarship and serious literary interests. Bitterness and wit have a tug of war in this mock memoir, as when the narrator's thoughts about his father lead to plays on the words "meaning" and "meanness." But they also echo an earlier, earnest pledge to challenge his father "in the ancient art of meanness, to which ongoing contest I submit this humble text." While Metcalf constantly impresses with his intelligence, his meta games and gnarly prose put such tough hurdles between the reader and this thorny parable of pain's memory that it's hard to see him winning more than a special, devoted audience.

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December 1, 2014

This debut from the former literary editor at Harper's magazine is a descriptive diatribe requiring careful reading for full appreciation of its wit. The book tells the tale of a family that moves from suburban Illinois ("the town") to rural Virginia ("the country"). Told through the first-person recollections of an unnamed son, this work is roughly poised as an ad hominem attack on "the country" in favor of "the town." Criticism of a tyrannical and abusive father looms large in the narrative, though it is often leavened with some attempt at understanding. The institution of the rural school bus, the language of social workers, and the very landscape of "the country" are also taken to task. Besides being quite amusing, this book provides a potent examination of rural culture and of life in general. Of particular note is a chicken named Buttfucker, an evil black snake, and the descriptive notes on various dogs owned by the narrator's family. VERDICT The recirculating structure and casual yet intensely cerebral nature of this book make an arresting though demanding read. Many will hate it, some may embrace it, a few will be marked by it; highly recommended for those who care. [See Prepub Alert, 7/14/14/]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015

"Town" is the place left behind, the place where our narrator might have grown up in something approximate to sanity, if life had gone differently. Instead, this is the story of a boy taken from Town and transported by his parents to rural Virginia, a hellish place where children are treated like mules and miseries are as numerous as flies. The boy's story is not told in a linear format. Rather, readers are sucked into winding, wordy paragraphs that pulse from eloquent reflections on topics as diverse as religion and whipping sticks. The experience of riding the school bus, for example, includes sentences like "I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation's children by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot?" For some teens, the innovative structure will be a refreshing change from traditional storytelling. Experimentation in art is often well appreciated by young, flexible minds. For others, the novelty of the text may be short-lived. VERDICT Metcalf demonstrates that literature can be a wild, untamed thing, constrained only by the limits of imagination and courage.-Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.