Allegheny Front

INTRODUCTION

ALLEGHENY FRONT HAS FEW SENTIMENTAL TRAPPINGS. Traveling salesmen meet up with the guns of the landed poor; tourists die, loggers die, cranky uncles are pulverized. But as often as men kill each other in Matthew Neill Null’s singular, strong collection, they kill animals more. And not just game animals, either: black bears are massacred, bald eagles killed and crucified. In these intelligent and unpretentious stories, men’s stubbornness is a rock face, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill.

In an era where even the more esoteric of literary fictions tend to have moved away from the rural, away from the beasts of the forests and fields, away from land-based individual sustenance and the rhythms of seasons and tide, Null’s stories are remarkable for both their sharp relevance and their otherness. They seem to uncover a texture of living that’s increasingly alien to urban readers, who, for better or worse, make up the lion’s share of buyers and borrowers of contemporary literary fiction in the United States. It’s a gritty texture precisely defined by the details of natural places, without the slickness and bright primary colors of highly engineered, exclusively human habitats. Null’s subtler palette is browns and greens, yellows and grays, the blues of sky and water.

It’d be disingenuous of me to call these stories “authentic,” since I’m frankly unqualified to judge the authenticity of foreign cultural representations — and make no mistake, the divide between rural and urban life in this country in 2016 is stark enough to make one foreign to the other. Of course, it’s not a literal divide and is far more nuanced than this reductive formulation (for instance, I live in the middle of the desert in a warm, red state, but I grew up urban and cold, and I don’t change my own flats).

Still, we who live it know it instinctively: there are at least two nations at odds with each other here and now, a profound schism dividing their dominant cultures. (Journalist Colin Woodard has famously, and with fairly minimal controversy, put the number of geocultural nations within our formal national boundaries higher, in fact, at eleven — and in Woodard’s scheme Null’s literary homeland of West Virginia is itself split into three cultures, two rural-based and only one small northern part “Yankee.”)

So, like much of my reading demographic, I know almost as little of hardscrabble country life in West Virginia as it’s possible to know. But I know a bit about land-use policy, a smidgeon about wildlife management, and a fair amount about natural resource conflicts, and Null’s stories have an extensive grounding in all of these. They interest themselves in the brutality with which we’ve plundered our legacy of wild places, in the excruciating social limits that drive personal choices, and the economic corners into which we paint each other and ourselves. Almost every piece touches on some part of the class enmity that festers between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, those who understand the land as a treasure to be protected and those who eke out a tough living directly from it.

Yet Allegheny Front is anything but one-sided or simplistically dualistic. It remains at a distance from judgment, at a remove from easy definitions, unspooling a lucid and often painful history of appetite, exploitation, and bereavement.

— Lydia Millet