{"id":15136,"date":"2015-02-04T12:43:51","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T16:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=15136"},"modified":"2015-02-04T12:43:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T16:43:51","slug":"ben-metcalf-against-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/02\/04\/ben-metcalf-against-the-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Metcalf: Against the Country<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the many myths we Americans dutifully accept as integral parts of our national heritage, one of the most pernicious has been the belief that country life is somehow purer, less corrupted, and more desirable than city life, the truest reflection of the hard-spun values and industrious spirit gifted to us through the generations by the Founders. This pervasive canard, which has persisted for centuries and entrenched itself into our culture and politics, finally meets its match with the unnamed narrator of Ben Metcalf\u2019s brilliantly perverse debut Against the Country<\/em> (2015).<\/p>\n

\"against-the-country\"<\/p>\n

Billed as a novel, this book is more aptly described as an unshackled rant, a largely plotless jeremiad detailing at great length its protagonist\u2019s myriad, all-consuming resentments toward the rural farm life he suffered through. It is as committed a performance of incandescent fury as modern literature has produced — and as funny — written in tidal waves of verbosity that recall both a dramatic 19th-century sermon and the unsettlingly lucid delusions of a madman.<\/p>\n

What plot there is concerns itself with the years after the narrator\u2019s father, for reasons his embittered son never quite works out, uprooted him, his mother, and his two siblings from the relative comforts of Southern Illinois (referred to drolly as \u201cTown\u201d) to the impoverished farmland of Goochland, Virginia (a real county, apparently), where a dark comedy of humiliation and subjugation to the land awaits them all.<\/p>\n

Here is how the novel begins:<\/p>\n

I was worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, and braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside, all because my parents did not trust that I would mature to their specifications.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That bracing but thrilling first sentence only gives you scant indication of how intricate and ornate the prose becomes (a better example is quoted below). You\u2019ll barely get through one syntactically-nightmarish complaint before another torrent of florid invective is unleashed at another subject. The only concession Metcalf makes for us is by dividing these volcanic riffs into seven books, each consisting of about a dozen two- to four-page chapters (with coy titles such as \u201cFor those still keeping track\u201d), allowing us much-needed breathers.<\/p>\n

Such subjects include, but are hardly limited to: blackberries, corn, chickens (\u201cprissy influenzas on feet\u201d), rats, ticks, snakes, wasps, his teachers (\u201cbearded mediocrities\u201d), and the daily horror of school buses (\u201ca roving metal stomach that would…gobble up the nation\u2019s schoolchildren by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot\u201d), which culminates in the book\u2019s most memorable and vividly rendered sequence.<\/p>\n

One of his first broadsides gets launched at the \u201cidyllic hallucinations\u201d of \u201caccomplices\u201d such as Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Emerson, and Thoreau, the frontier figures that created and propagated the Edenic notion of country life that duped his family and enslaved the narrator in a back-breaking childhood of backwoods despair:<\/p>\n

That we chose to head south, though, is a blow no God who retained even the smallest affection for His American subjects would have dealt us, and that we settled in so useless a stretch of the kudzu is a masterstroke no combination of Jeffersons could feasibly have arranged. I must therefore conclude, as I was moved at least to suspect during my long years of exile from town, that the land itself, and especially the land of the Virginia Piedmont, wooded and weed-choked and encased in hard red clay where we had been led to expect some semblance of topsoil, was actively, and perhaps even knowingly, involved in our doom.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frequently calling the narrative we hold in our hands as his \u201cattempt to end all this\u201d — \u201cthis\u201d ostensibly being the adult narrator\u2019s reckoning with his checkered childhood\u00a0 before it finally consumes him, a breakdown that manifests itself in the far less coherent second half — the narrator saves plenty of vitriol for his abusive and almost mythic father:<\/p>\n

My father was by then a teacher, the builder in him having so gleefully demolished his spine that some years prior he, or my mother, had resolved that he should seek out and win a certificate, of all things, that would enable him to teach English and mathematics to the delinquents at her recent place of employment, thereafter his<\/em>, which decision would condemn us all to a belief on his part that he had mastered not only words and numbers now but also psychology<\/em>, since psychology<\/em> was what presumably caused all those pimply-dicked offenders to grow agitated by the semi-confident drone of his voice (as we all had), and to question his legendarily cornfed but actually television-gorged machismo (as we all had), and to throw their books into the air (as I did myself on more than one occasion) and try to make it out of his classroom, whereupon they found themselves tackled by his bulk and inherent hatred of them (a legal maneuver, he was forever at pains to point out, since the courts\u2019 recognition of his right to employ restraint-type violence against a fed-up JD clearly forgave, and by Benthamesque sliding scale even sanctioned, his more extreme and less rational violence against us), after which these potential \u201crunners\u201d were \u201cheld down\u201d and \u201creasoned with\u201d until a \u201cgroup meeting\u201d could be called to address the \u201cissues\u201d beneath the \u201cacting out\u201d (never his, mind you, the issues or the acting out), which would (for want of imagination, or for want of language, which is anyway the same thing) be boiled down into an unresolved homosexuality (admittedly an overworked theme here, though only insofar as it was there) or, or and<\/em>, a failure to acknowledge (not merely to recognize but finally to accept<\/em>) an adult\u2019s prerogative to dominate a child for whatever reason the adult saw fit to claim. Which is all anyone needs to know about psychology and the law.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no question that 300 pages of this is both exhausting and torturous. It demands total concentration and in some cases, multiple readings that don\u2019t always justify it. Sympathetic characters number zero. And as his narrative chugs along, grievance piled on top of clause-ridden grievance, the narrator begins adopting more formally postmodern and obfuscatory techniques, including fourth-wall breaks and parenthetical asides embedded three or four times within each other, rendering his account all but unreadable (I admit that a sequence in the fifth book describing the father\u2019s opinions of J.D. Salinger fully conquered me). That said, every time Metcalf threatened to lose me in the page-long sentences, the lit-theory gamesmanship, or out of simple fatigue, his narrator snapped me back with his singularly demented voice.<\/p>\n

While I find myself enthusiastically recommending Against the Country<\/em> as the first great read of 2015, unlike any other book we are likely to encounter this year, it\u2019s hard to love something that resists every advance of emotional connection you try to make with it. But I loved the three days I spent in the company of this family and their unforgettable world, and I love its author\u2019s chutzpah to portray it without compromise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael reviews Ben Metcalf’s debut novel, Against the Country<\/em>. <\/u>Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":15137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[713],"tags":[],"coauthors":[528],"class_list":["post-15136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ben-metcalf"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/against-the-country.jpg?fit=620%2C910&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3W8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15138,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15136\/revisions\/15138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15136"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}