This Is a Novel About Dirt

If my parents’ generation grew up threatened by swift,

thermonuclear extinction, my son’s generation is growing up in the
era of global warming and resource wars. For my son, most likely,
extinction will seem slow and inexorable. It will seem like the result
of his everyday actions: the result of wanting to be warm in the
morning when he gets out of bed, of his constant reading and all those
trees churned up into paper, of his insatiable love of yogurt, of his
imagination, by now, totally intertwined with energy-hungry machines.
My parents’ generation, living under a superpower that seemed poised to
use its nuclear arsenal, envisioned love, likewise, as a radical
underground power. They conjured up an equal and opposite release to
counter the near infinite violence of the atom.

So what happens if it turns out that love isn’t revolutionary at
all, but is, rather, a stubborn habit that traps us in the place of our
destruction? This painful awareness runs through Ann Pancake’s debut
novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been. Set in the West
Virginian mountaintop-removal coal fields, the novel focuses on the
Ricker See family, who live in a hollow not far from where coal is dug
24 hours a day by a 200-foot-tall machine called a dragline. Things are
bad and getting worse—no jobs, no money, fish kills, and
selenium, arsenic, cadmium, and nickel in the groundwater and the
rainwater—and after every storm there’s the possibility that the
slurry impoundments will burst and drown the families who still own
land in the hollows. Ultimately, the Ricker Sees have to decide whether
to abandon their home as the coal company moves mountain after mountain
closer, permit after permit, from Yellowroot to Cherryboy; when staying
means the slow death of all that they love, and leaving betrays love
itself.

This irreconcilable dilemma gives Strange as This Weather Has
Been the structure of a classical tragedy, a choice that is no
choice: sacrifice the thing you love most, or be destroyed. As in the
Greek plays, the men in Pancake’s novel capitulate, giving in to powers
beyond their control; and the women stubbornly resist, waiting for what
they love to kill them. Here’s Lace describing the weak breathing of
her father, a coal miner dying of silicosis. “His lungs are being
buried by it, by coal, which is earth, which is this place, and still,
he wants nothing but to be out in it. On the land, like me, like us,
despite the burying it does, and what the hell, what the hell is it?
Why do we have to love it like we do? The Bible says we are made of
dust, but after that making, everybody else leaves the dirt and lives
in air, except us, oh no. We eat off it, dig in it, doctor from it,
work under it. Us, we grow up swaddled in it, ground around our
shoulders, over top our heads, we work both the top and the underside
of the earth, we are surrounded. And still, Daddy wanting
nothing
at the end but to sit and look at land. Even though inside it drowns
him.”

The allure of Pancake’s first book—her story collection,
Given Ground, which won the Bakeless Prize in 2000—was
the gorgeous sound of her sentences. In Strange as This Weather Has
Been, the language has more muscle, forced as it is to do the work
of real hurt.

Only rarely in the book does Pancake’s deftness flag. Mogey’s
chapter, crucial as a tonal pivot point, verges on heavy-handed; and,
at times during Lace’s chapters about her bourgeoning activism, the
characters stand out from the story as mouthpieces of unfiltered
reportage. Otherwise, Pancake writes chapters with the dense thematic
cohesion of short stories, and creates characters who are as various
and intricate as the landscapes of Cherryboy and Yellowroot before they
were stripped bare. Her characters know that leaving is their best
chance for survival, and yet, when they leave, they feel the emptiness
of everywhere else: of the unnatural orange dome over a city’s
nighttime, of the constant whir of the freeway, of the people who walk
around closed off as if with two doors in front of their faces, “this
thick screen door, and behind that, a heavy storm one. And occasionally
they’d open the storm door and speak through the screen. But then
they’d close the storm door again.”

What Pancake writes of West Virginia is true of her
novel—”This place so subtly beautiful and so overlaid with doom.”
It is a novel beautiful in its sense that this time we may have finally
ruined the eternal renewal of spring. It is a novel painted with the
desperate autumn colors of an old earth. Lace’s daughter Bant says to
her grandmother, “I’m too young to have nothing but past to believe
in.” The idea of having nothing to believe in but a past is awful. Yet
mountain after mountain, Pancake suggests, we borrow from the future to
pay for the present, justifying it with a seemingly inexhaustible hope
that borders on delusional. As Americans, we are perpetually making a
heaven of the future. If we aren’t rich, our children will be. If we
aren’t educated, our children will be. If we are destroying the earth,
our children will save it. Pancake’s novel shows how hard it will be
for our children to face what we’ve spent so long refusing to see,
which, I suppose, is why the phrase strange as this weather has
been doesn’t end, but instead just trails off.

Over the last several years, critics have anxiously looked to
fiction to account for the drama of reality. Expecting insight to come
from the obvious landmarks, they’ve assessed the emerging series of
9/11 novels—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close, John Updike’s Terrorist, Don DeLillo’s
Falling Man. And yet, I have a feeling that, over time, those
novels will seem merely symptomatic, while Pancake’s novel, wedding so
carefully character, setting, history, love, land, and labor, will
represent better the cultural urgencies of our time.