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Books highlight lives in East Tennessee and beyond

by Paul Lewis

Local writer Jeanne McDonald, best known around town as the co-author of the non-fiction books The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith and Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers as well as being a contributor to noteworthy periodicals, including Metro Pulse, has again graced the shelves and stacks with her first entry into the Southern Fiction canon with an elegant and weighty first novel, Water Dreams (University Press of Mississippi, $25). Although grounded in the geography and the demeanor of Knoxville and its rivers, streams and mountains, it also echoes with the sort of universality that allows it to be much more than a fine Southern novel.

The motif of this tome is that of drowning, beginning with a literal drowning witnessed by the book’s protagonist, Miller Sharp. Miller can easily be characterized as an average guy with an average family; he loves his wife, Katie, and feels a distance between himself and his teenage son, Judd. He has a good job but takes little pride in it. He begins the story on a solitary fishing expedition, reminiscing about his father, his hero, deceased but a few months. There, he witnesses a young reveler disappear under the water, his companions unwilling or unable to act to prevent tragedy.

As Miller attempts to aid the struggling boy, he finds himself fighting to save his own life as the desperate Jimmy Duane Goodfriend almost pulls him under. The only way Miller can escape is by biting Goodfriend’s hand, an action which seals the man’s death. Miller drags Goodfriend’s body to land, but it’s too late to save him. Miller is attacked by the man’s young wife, Adra, and leaves before the police can arrive. He is haunted by the incident in dreams and becomes fascinated by the life of the man he was unable to save; a husband and father like himself.

This begins not so much a descent as a series of currents and undercurrents that pinball Miller against his hopes, his dreams, and his definition of himself as a man. Haunted by the guilt of his actions, he distances himself from his wife, pushes away his already-remote son, and finds himself drawn to Adra, an uneducated country girl not much older than his son, first as a caretaker, then as a lover. He quits his job, considers opening a bait shop or moving to the beach, and becomes a spectator to the life he formerly enjoyed, all while struggling to reconcile himself to his father’s legacy.

It is easy to take Miller, or even his wife, to task for their behavior; Miller for his obsession brought on by trauma, Katie for her inability to sympathize with her husband’s melancholia, but then one is not allowing the humanness of these characters to wash over them. That is the difficulty of this book, to see people not terribly unlike ourselves changed utterly by chance, making unwise choices that we would probably make in turn, and having to come out the other side with them. Just like good characters and interesting people, the inhabitants of Water Dreams have the potential to delight, surprise, and infuriate as if they were favorite neighbors or wayward roommates. The sense of closeness is a delight to find in any fiction, and certainly in fiction from one’s very own hometown.

Another book published by the University Press of Mississippi presents an emotional and geographic portrait of East Tennessee via a pictorial history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In TVA Photography: Thirty Years Of Life In The Tennessee Valley (University Press of Mississippi, $48 and $22), author Patricia Bernard Ezzell documents TVA’s first 30 years with a series of photographs that breathe life into the public works that many of us know by sight.

Following a brief history of the organization, Ezzell presents black and white pictures by a variety of staff photographers documenting not only the construction and architecture of a series of dams and power plants, but the change to the environment and the people helped and displaced throughout the process that irretrievably changed an entire region’s sense of place. Different photographs will evoke different memories, but Knoxville highlights include a shot of a low stage of the Tennessee River underneath the Gay Street Bridge from 1941 and a shot of a worker laboring near the highest point of what would become Norris Dam from 1936. What emerges is a portrait of Herculean labor, human ingenuity, and a place that, for better or worse, would never be quite the same again.