Serena

by Ron Rash

Serena

When I finished Serena years ago, I was glad to be free of such a frightening human, but several characters, particularly Rachel and her child, and Ross, a timber cutter, kept telling me there was more to tell, so I have now written “In the Valley,” in which Serena returns to North Carolina a last time to take care of some final business, both work-related and personal, including killing Rachel Harmon and her child. Learn more about "In the Valley" on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48889440-in-the-valley?ref=knh

“It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming into it. Tears from the very start.”

Such is the world my characters in Serena live in, as do we do also in these plague times.

what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting.

I wrote this line one day when I was thinking of how I couldn’t remember which side my father (dead three decades) parted his hair. Checking a photo answered the question, but it struck me that, as this line says, memory has to dim, at least somewhat, for us to be able to bear their loss.

And now this brown-eyed child. Don’t love it, Rachel told herself. Don’t love anything that can be taken away.

This was a crucial moment when I was writing Serena, because I knew that, try as she might, Rachel would love her child.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I should never have doubted your knowledge of venom.”

Dr. Chaney is playing a dangerous game of wits with Serena, underestimating her because of her sex, a fatal mistake.

“And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when it’s all around you sure enough know it.”

Once again, the wise fools understand the evil that surrounds them in their own rustic diction

“This is what we want,” she said, her voice deepening, the emotion so often controlled fully unbridled now. “To be like this always. No past or future, pure enough to live totally in the present.”

Serena wants to live a life of pure vitalism, something she learns her husband cannot do. When working on the novel, this moment was important, an early moment where Pemberton realizes his wife is willing herself into a purity he cannot achieve.

“It’s very relevant,” Serena said. “My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one’s personal failures.”

Serena is intensely cynical about human motivations, but part of her allure, like Jordan Baker in Gatsby, is her utter lack of hypocrisy.

Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.”

I’ve always admired Shakespeare’s wise fools, who make acute observations though they appear to be clownish and uneducated.

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did.

I’ve always been moved by the ritual of eating a communal meal after a death, something shared but a reminder life goes on. A small, good thing, as Raymond Carver would say

“She said to tell you she thought you the one man ever strong and pure enough to be her equaling, but you wanting that child alive showed the otherwise of that.”

Galloway is ultimately the best “partner’ for Serena, and he will be with her until the day they die. Pemberton’s crime is his humanness.

Mrs. Pemberton said absolutely not, then turned the conversation to a tract of brazilwood in Pernambuco, which she hoped to purchase with the help of a West German tractor company.

In Serena, I mention that in Brazil her last business partnership is with a “West German tractor company.” The company is the Mengele tractor company, owned by the relatives of the notorious Nazi Joseph Mengele. During the decades Joseph Mengele hid out in Brazil, the company was in contact with him, so it’s clear he and Serena are in cahoots. That Serena would end up with a Nazi as a last business partner seemed appropriate.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My new book, “In the Valley,” continues the story of Serena Pemberton, and it includes her and Galloway’s last attempt to kill her late husband’s former lover and child. Part of the reason I felt it timely to return to Serena is the environmental threat, particularly to our national parks, that we are facing once again, as when I wrote Serena in 2008. Learn more about "In the Valley" on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48889440-in-the-valley?ref=knh