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Contemporary Fiction Views: The past manifests itself in a Georgia family's legacy [1]
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Date: 2022-10-18
The past is present in many novels in which characters grapple with the fallout of earlier sins and travails. When this happens in an multi-generational novel on cursed land, the age-old story can be gripping.
Andy Davidson's The Hollow Kind is such a story. In 1989, Nellie has fled an abusive marriage with her 11-year-old son, taking advantage of the surprise legacy from her grandfather. There is a ramshackle house, a Winnebago that's filled with rotting junk, and 1,000 acres of Georgia land on which pine trees were used and abused for the turpentine they could produce.
Nellie's grandfather, August Redfern, started out with a few acres from his father-in-law, a carpetbagger who cheated landowners to begin his empire. (In Empire, Georgia.)
August's teenage bride adores him, but he's not the kind who returns affection with his whole heart. Effie thinks it's the trees that he loves, and nothing else. He's come from New England after a rough upbringing and even harder work.
The pitch he gives to potential workers is enlightened for 1917, promising equality and opportunity to create lives of their own. When the scion of a victim of his carpetbagger father-in-law confronts him, August's deputy assaults him and ends the potential rebellion.
As the community of loggers grows and sets down roots, Effie gives birth on Christmas Eve. There is a surprise that cements her heartache.
The growing Redfern legacy manifests itself in more than one way. There is a haunting presence on the land, perhaps the result of the environmental pillaging. Whether reading The Hollow Kind as a horror story or menacing Southern gothic, the connection between what the Redferns have done to the land and to each other is deep and complex.
Davidson's story is both a page-turner and thoughtful.
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