Deep Water

The Tennessee Valley Authority brought change to the heart of Appalachia in the 1930s, forcing locals to relocate voluntarily or linger on the land and be removed by their own government. Though the damming of the river would provide electricity and other conveniences across the region, there were many who were not swayed by arguments of the common good and tried to stay, even as the water rose across their fields and toward the houses. Early on in Amy Greene’s aching, passionate and vivid new novel, “Long Man,” a character stands in the night, surveying all that will be lost to progress. “She had heard about a Depression going on but saw no evidence of it herself. She didn’t understand the power company’s reasoning. She didn’t need electric lights when she could see by the sun and moon. She had the spring and the earth to keep her food from spoiling. She had a washboard for scrubbing clean her dresses. If a person didn’t come to depend on material things, it wouldn’t hurt to lose them.”

The title of the novel is translated from the Native American name for the river. Those tribes had inhabited these hills for centuries before being supplanted by ancestors of the hill folk suddenly facing their own diaspora. The T.V.A. is a great boon, perhaps, but it is attended by wrenching upheaval and anguish, doubt and sadness. Greene seems ideally suited to tell this story, to take a slice of Appalachian history and render it as literature. She has the necessary gifts and knows these characters well, inside and out. The novel takes place over three days in the summer of 1936. Most residents of Yuneetah, Tenn., have already abandoned their homes, hoping to find factory work in Detroit, Chicago or Cincinnati, because “nobody could stand alone against the government.” Annie Clyde Dodson, however, is still unwilling to surrender, to pack her family up and go. She sees this land as her daughter’s inheritance, and can’t accept that the future she hoped for is simply no longer possible. Water rises by the minute, hour by hour spilling across familiar fields and lapping the edges of the lightless town.

The plot is simple but rich, and provides great suspense. One evening Annie Clyde’s husband, James, is trying to persuade her to accept the inevitable and move to Detroit, but in the midst of their argument they notice that their 3-year-old daughter and her dog have disappeared. Annie Clyde saw Amos, the one-eyed drifter, in her field earlier that day and suspects he has taken her child. The hunt for Amos and the girl triggers conflict among the few remaining residents. Amos is the adopted son of old Beulah, who reads bones and has second sight, and will always protect him. He is both better and worse than he is thought to be: “He had no real ideology,” Greene writes. “He had no set convictions. He had only his loathing for the men who ran everything.”

“Long Man” carries the weight of tragedy, but in Greene’s hands it does not feel excessively tragic. “The dam would stand in memory, but not of their individual lives,” thinks a character who’s sure they will all be forgotten. Even though the overall ending for Yuneetah has been written by history, this powerful novel proves him wrong.