Justin Mundhenk<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Too often the Appalachian experience\u2014like so many marginalized American experiences\u2014is trivialized and caricatured, and unfortunately, the literary world is no stranger to such practices. Local color writing introduced 19th<\/sup>-century Americans to the hillbilly bumpkin, a stereotype that pervades popular culture to this day. And thanks to Deliverance<\/em>, Appalachia is also thought of as a region littered with hidden dangers. A lonesome traveler, according to fictional accounts, could find themselves interacting with a toothless, tobacco-spitting stranger harboring violent intentions. That\u2019s why I approached John Yount\u2019s Hardcastle<\/em> 2014 reprint\u2014courtesy of Open Road Media\u2014with skepticism. Dialogue like \u201cGot some white here that\u2019ll keep the cold out if ye\u2019ve a mind,\u201d and an early reference to \u201cmountain people,\u201d had me convinced that I was reading a novel trying too hard to establish its authenticity (because what\u2019s more authentic than highly stylized dialogue meant to capture the mountain folk dialect?). But I read on, and then I read again.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that Hardcastle<\/em> is an important novel reintroduced at just the right time.<\/p>\n Hardcastle<\/em> tells the story of Bill Music, a young man in search of the American dream, and explores the search for self and home in a Kentucky coalmining town during the Great Depression. The novel is framed by a summer day in 1979, when, at the age of 67, Bill Music finds himself \u201cout of kilter . . . and even a little mislaid in time.\u201d Soon we\u2019re transported back to 1931 as Music limps his way home to Virginia. He finds himself in Switch County, Kentucky, where he takes lodging with Ella and Regus Bone, a mother-son combo never short on hospitality. With Regus\u2019 help and a desire not to return home beaten, Music hires on as a mine guard with the Hardcastle Coal Company. While carrying out his duties, he meets Merlee Taylor, a young, widowed mother whose husband was killed by a previous mine guard, or as she calls them, a \u201ccompany goon.\u201d Music starts to question his occupation and loyalty to Hardcastle Coal, and eventually both he and Regus are faced with a decision: which side will they choose?<\/p>\n As storytelling goes, Hardcastle<\/em> has plenty of momentum to keep readers turning the pages, but don\u2019t be fooled, this is also a novel rich with layers. Yount continually hits his stride at the sentence level when painting Appalachia. Soon after landing in Switch County, Music takes a moment to observe the landscape: \u201cThere was a field yet green on his right with long beige grasses at its edge, swirled and cow-licked by the wind. Some of the trees still held color, some were bare; already the unrelinquished leaves of the oaks were brown. Up the mountains toward the tops of hogbacks and ridges, there were laurel thickets and pines, the green of them deep and lusterless against the pale blue sky.\u201d Descriptions are judicious and evocative, rarely falling into the typical rendering of Appalachia even when depicting the most impoverished aspects. Sure, we get our fill of suffering and shanties and tobacco spit, but Yount\u2019s writing is warm and generous, so full of life, avoiding the hillbilly caricatures all too common in fictional accounts of Appalachia.<\/p>\n There are also the underlying themes of love and friendship in the face of hardship, and at the heart of the novel, the quest to find one\u2019s place\u2014the true American dream. Young Music\u2019s failed search for financial success and independence proves to be something much more\u2014the ability to clearly define home or, as the older Music suggests: \u201chome is simply not a place after all, but a time, and when it\u2019s gone, it\u2019s gone forever.\u201d The novel is clearly interested in how we define \u201cself\u201d in relation to others and to place. While these are some of the reasons I returned to Hardcastle<\/em> a second time, they aren\u2019t the main ones.<\/p>\n I came back again because the novel asks us to consider the relationship between person and occupation, particularly labor-relations and exploitation in America. Like all novels, Hardcastle<\/em> doesn\u2019t offer an answer or solution, but it does ask us to consider a coalminer\u2019s lived experience during a time in which wages were paid in script only redeemable at the company store. Furthermore, we\u2019re offered a grim view of capitalism\u2019s power structure: \u201cIt was always the miner who had to sneak about being careful not to be seen, who had to avoid the public way. Men with badges traveled the highroad and came right up in your face, not from a lack of imagination, but because they had everything on their side: the legal rights, the power, the gall.\u201d The coalminers are placed in stark opposition to the man they work for, Kenton Hardcastle. The coalminers\u2019 meager existence depends on their labor, while Hardcastle profits from the deadly, backbreaking work of others.<\/p>\n Thirty-five years after its original publication, and eighty-four years after the story\u2019s setting, Hardcastle<\/em> keeps the plight of an already marginalized region and its people in full view. Most importantly, the novel entertains issues playing out in larger conversations throughout the country: the value of labor, the meaning that gets assigned to an occupation, and the definition of \u201cself\u201d in a system that arbitrarily assigns value to human life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Review of Hardcastle<\/em>\u00a0by John Yount<\/p>\n Open Road Integrated Media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Justin Mundhenk Too often the Appalachian experience\u2014like so many marginalized American experiences\u2014is trivialized and caricatured, and unfortunately, the literary world is no stranger to such practices. Local color writing introduced 19th-century Americans to the hillbilly bumpkin, a stereotype that pervades popular culture to this day. And thanks to Deliverance, Appalachia is also thought of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":540,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-written-by"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/nightowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}