Review: One Foot in Eden

One Foot in Eden, by Ron Rash (Picador 2002)

First line: “There had been trouble in the upper part of the county at a honky-tonk called The Borderline, and Bobby had come by the house because he didn’t want to go up there alone.”

When I read Saints at the River at the end of 2021, I knew I wanted to read more from Ron Rash, so I snagged this used copy of his debut back on Independent Bookstore Day from my local indie. Now that I’m going to be seeing him in person again next month for an event at said bookstore for the release of his newest, The Caretaker, I wanted to dive into his words again.

Once again, I found myself reading about a community just minutes from where I live, something that is so special and that I have so rarely had a chance to do, having spent most of my life in central Illinois, the setting of which does not grace many novels. Honestly, I know my reading of this book is colored by that fact alone — seeing places and characters I so vividly recognize among these pages, even if it is set about seven decades ago. But I also feel confident that you don’t have to live in rural upstate South Carolina to see the outstanding writing here.

Sheriff Will Alexander is called to check on the whereabouts of local war vet Holland Winchester, after his elderly mother swears he’s been murdered. She says she knows who did it, too, the neighboring farmer, Billy Holcombe. The only problem is, the body is nowhere to be found, and neither Billy or his wife are talking.

I thought I knew where this story was headed when I started it, but Rash kept surprising me with the twists he took. That’s not to say this is a thriller, by any means, nor the police procedural/crime fiction that I thought it was. It’s so much quieter than that, melancholy and desperate and haunting. It felt almost like a Greek tragedy at times. But beneath and behind all that melancholy, and what kept me from suffocating from it and turning the pages, were all the examples of love Rash shows here. Love between spouses, love between parent and child, love of the land, love for community… Over and over again, there was love.

I continued to be impressed by this writer, and am excited to read his newest after seeing him speak next month.