The World Made Straight

Travis Shelton, 17, intelligent, put-upon, and headstrong, is trying to make something of himself in rural North Carolina. He runs afoul of the Toomeys, a father-and-son team of ill-tempered marijuana growers, and ends up maimed. However, the tragedy brings him closer to Lori, an overachieving high school classmate, and Leonard Shuler, a disgraced former teacher turned drug dealer. Leonard recognizes Travis’ potential and prepares him to get his GED, but a secret from the past – and interference from the Toomeys – threaten to undermine their progress.

Credit Ron Rash for being able to craft a novel that is simultaneously bleak and hopeful. In many ways, the book is as hard-bitten as mountains and dirt and gravel that comprise its setting. Rash employs his usual landscape poetics, but they aren’t as prominent here as they are in some of his other works. That is because his characters are well-developed enough to command more of the attention. Leonard is the epitome of wasted potential, a drunk who lets the things he values most in life (wife, child, job) slip right through his fingers. His housemate/rescue, Dena, is even more pathetic: an uncontrollable, oft-abused pill-popper who still maintains a glimmer of her former beauty. Both characters nevertheless do just enough to make you care about them and hope they find redemption.

Travis, on the other hand, represents the hope side of the equation. He is fully believable as a protagonist: intelligent, yet ignorant; stubborn, yet continually bossed around by others; competent (when motivated), yet entirely incapable of making it on his own. Watching him try to become a better person while sensing that it is only a matter of time before he screws something up gives the book its tension.

If there is one thing about The World Made Straight that feels less than masterful, it is the inclusion of a Civil War doctor’s journal entries between chapters. The doctor – and the final entries – become quite important to the plot later on, but the early entries are awash in minutiae. Clearly, Rash’s aim is consistency, but these too often read like filler.

All and all, The World Made Straight offers a harrowing look at desperate people living hard lives. It pulls no punches as to the challenges they face, but it also demands with great urgency that they face them.

8.5/10