by Kelly Pickerill
Josh Weil’s debut, The New Valley, is comprised of three novellas set in rural Virginia. I read the first novella, “Ridge Weather,” through in one sitting and, exercising much self-control, decided to blog about Mr. Weil and his upcoming event at Lemuria (this Thursday, the 25th, starting at 5 o’clock) before devouring the next.
In an earlier post, Lisa sang the praises of the short story; quite a few of us Lemurians share a soft spot for this form of prose and regularly find ourselves having to defend it. I’d like to add the novella to our defense. The novella often reads like a short story, able to hone in on the mundane to make it majestic, while still having room to flex its sprawling muscles the way only a novel can.
Josh Weil’s collection is no exception — the novellas are almost impressionistic as their language attempts to paint a picture of a succinct moment in the lives of their protagonists. But the painting that emerges is not a portrait, as it would be in a short story; instead, it is more of a focused landscape, one in which all of the peripheral details are as sharply defined as the subject.
The first novella in The New Valley, “Ridge Weather,” uses the winter elements — bitter cold, snow, wind — as a backdrop for the main character, loner Osby Caudill, who has just lost his father to suicide and finds only small comfort in continuing to care for the herd of cattle he and his father once tended together. Osby’s increasing desperation for socialization and physical contact with another person leads to his ever more desperately pushing people away, until he finally clings to a dying steer as a replacement for human connection. Throughout the novella, Weil’s expertly drawn detail guide the journey Osby takes. Osby may not come to many revelations, as usually occurs in a novel, but Weil’s sense of place and mood gently envelop the reader in Osby’s isolated world as well as any short story could hope to do.
“If a short story is a piece of furniture and a novel is a house, then a novella is a room — and in that room a skilled writer can sometimes find space for all the aberrations and terrors and longings of a character’s life. The right room can intimate its occupant’s past and future, frustrations and failures, the shape of the house beyond . . . Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.” — Anthony Doerr, in The New York Times Book Review
The New Valley is a great addition to any collection: order a signed copy through our website or come to Lemuria Thursday to meet this talented new writer.
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