FICTION
‘This Dark Road to Mercy’
By Wiley Cash
William Morrow, $25.99, 240 pages
How long does it take to write a novel?
“A hack writer can tell,” William Faulkner once said. “‘As I Lay Dying’ took six weeks. ‘The Sound and The Fury’ took three years.”
His candid, sarcastic answer proves the pointlessness of the question, at least for those rare novels that stand outside the confines of time.
Wiley Cash is no hack writer, but his latest effort does bring up the timing issue.
The author has said he worried over the manuscript for his first novel, “A Land More Kind Than Home,” for nearly five years before publication. An astonishing Southern Gothic page-turner, the book detailed sinister deeds among a North Carolina congregation of snake handlers, drawing comparisons to Faulkner, Harper Lee and Thomas Wolfe. Cash’s talent for craftsmanship is apparent throughout. The novel became one of the most buzzed-about literary debuts of 2012.
Now, not two years later, he returns to rural North Carolina with a fast follow-up, “This Dark Road to Mercy.” The similarly wordy titles and cover treatments (grim farmsteads in fading daylight) may be misleading. The new book isn’t a sequel, nor is it all that similar to his first in terms of tone or precision.
Easter Quillby, age 12, stands out as the star of the novel’s three narrators. The temperamental pre-teen tries to protect her young sister, Ruby, after a drug overdose kills their mother. An upsetting scene describes the girls’ discovery of the woman comatose but breathing, and implies that Easter is partly at fault for not immediately calling paramedics.
Living in foster care, obsessing over boys and baseball, Easter appears unfazed by the tragedy — or in denial about her shifting fortunes. She isn’t thrilled to learn that her grandparents in Alaska have begun the adoption process, a plan interrupted when her estranged father turns up. Wade Chesterfield, a washed-up minor league baseball player, quickly convinces his daughters to flee town with him. He fails to mention the duffel bag stuffed with hundreds in his trunk or the one-eyed hit man on his trail.
While the book’s opening scenes read like a darker-than-average novel for young adults, the introduction of the steroid-pumped assassin Pruitt juices up the action and jackknifes the tone, discarding any traces of “Where the Lilies Bloom” by veering into Cormac McCarthy country.
The book’s tonal blend grows more complicated with the arrival of Brady Weller, a damaged ex-cop with a stake in Easter and Ruby’s safety. As the story slogs through police procedural stuff, Weller connects Wade to a straight-from-central-casting crime boss. The subplot involving Weller’s quest for atonement delivers instances of authentic pathos, but we’re restless to return to the runaway Quillby kids.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of baseball’s Great Home Run Race of 1998 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Sports reports punctuate the prose like clockwork, an odd plot device that eventually makes sense in the final act’s violent climax at a major sports arena.
Readers who admired Cash’s first novel may exit “This Dark Road to Mercy” deliberating over its overwrought title, which seems to be negated by a major character’s puzzling choice near the finale. Questions of timing also surface. Did Cash write this book before “A Land More Kind Than Home”? It reads like it might have been a “starter novel” he had stored in a drawer someplace. It’s admittedly more cohesive than a practice book (Cash is, after all, more talented than most), but it shows a curious reliance on stock characters and overused tropes of crime fiction, tics of fledgling writers.
If he wrote “This Dark Road” after the previous novel’s success, it may represent something different: a serviceable manuscript rushed to press before the author had ironed out some of the big-picture concerns. Easter’s curvy road to forgiving her father deserves more signage. Wade, an interesting character, is itching to be an irresistible one. While the steroids subplot is a non-starter, the book also misses many chances to explore pertinent emotional issues: The girls’ grief over their mother’s death, sibling rivalry, the unsettling power of family members to both inspire and disappoint one another.
Cash’s flair for storytelling is apparent. Many fine moments of humor and ingenuity help counterbalance the book’s plotting and thematic stumbles (and dreary cover imagery). Easter longs to change her name to “Boston Terrier,” a funny running gag abandoned too soon. Moments of levity involving baseball mascot Rowdy Ranger and dry commentary on “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Oregon Trail” add light and richness to the narrative.
“This Dark Road to Mercy” begins as a coming-of-age story, but by the finale reads more like a by-the-book crime novel. This baseball story’s “pitch” is off — just slightly. While nobody’s denying the author’s aptitude with language, Cash’s many converts can hope “This Dark Road” was only a brief diversion through the sophomore slump.
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