THE CARETAKER

Set in Rash's beloved midcentury Appalachia, a nimbly plotted, suspenseful romance with a twist—its titular hero is the third wheel.

Blackburn Gant is by habit, inclination, and necessity a loner. Disfigured (as he sees it) by polio and abandoned by his family members, who've moved to Florida, Blackburn has taken work, permanently it seems, as live-in caretaker of a mountain cemetery near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. When his closest friend, Jacob Hampton, gets drafted into the Korean War, Gant assumes responsibility, too, for protecting and tending to Jacob's pregnant wife. Naomi Clarke, only 16, is an outlander from distant Tennessee who came east to work as a hotel maid; she's ill-educated (but working diligently on that so that she can write better letters), without means, friends, or support. When she and Jacob—scion of the town's most prominent family, shopkeepers revered for their generosity with credit during the Depression—met and fell in love, Jacob's family disowned him, and now they refuse to have anything to do with Naomi. After a scary confrontation with Jacob's father early in her third trimester, when Naomi and Blackburn venture out to the movies, Blackburn helps Naomi move back home, seven hours west, to await the baby and her husband's return. But when—as recounted in the novel's bravura opening, a hand-to-hand combat scene that evokes James Dickey's To the White Sea—Jacob is grievously wounded, his parents see the prospect of his long convalescence as a chance to put things right—or to put them horribly wrong—and they seize that chance. Rash writes with finesse and affection, as usual, of western North Carolina and its people. But the mood isn't mere nostalgia—there's a flint and an unflinching realism underneath, especially in his portrayal of the stalwart, utterly solid Blackburn Gant, that elevates the novel.

Rash's 20th book is among his best.