Author Zak Jones grew up in North Carolina, where the novel takes place.Carmen Cheung/Supplied
- Title: Fancy Gap
- Author: Zak Jones
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
- Pages: 336
The Appalachian Mountains span more than 3,000 kilometres and are about 480 million years old. The hills may not actually have eyes, but they have certainly borne witness to the variously joyous and tragic fates that befall the people who live in them. And, of course, the ancient ridge is perhaps best known in pop culture for being more or less the poorest place in the U.S.
The poverty rate in Appalachia far exceeds the national average, and many of the 400-odd counties, spanning 13 states, are mostly isolated rural enclaves. Many movies, TV shows, and books – most notably the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which launched JD Vance’s career as a public figure and eventually landed him in the role of Donald Trump’s Vice-President – have fed the public a horrifying image of Appalachia as a place of brutal destitution, drug addiction and cruelty. The stereotypes are so prolific, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the famously banned episode of The X Files, that it’s hard to see past the stock characters and poverty.
Enter Zak Jones, whose debut novel, Fancy Gap, complicates the image of the region. Jones, a dual Canadian and American citizen, is a U.S. Army veteran and grew up in North Carolina, where the novel takes place. It follows three generations of the Fuquay family and depicts the way addiction, violence and poverty endemic to the region both create and cut the ties that bind them.
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Fancy Gap both upholds and upends the stereotypes, a balance made possible as a result of the way Jones uses language and his cast of characters. In alternating chapters that hew close to the perspectives of Grace, her daughter Jane, and grandchildren Dalton and Messiah, Jones fleshes out a picture of the larger community.
Grace, a grandmother with a vain streak of religious fervour, becomes a backwoods pastor, hosting revivals and promising brimstone and fury; her church gives “alms” to parishioners who show up to work her plot of land in the mountains. The “alms” are usually stolen opioids.
Jane is an alcoholic in and mostly out of recovery. Her eldest son, Dalton, is due back from the army and her youngest, Messiah, Messy for short, is nearly grown. Jane’s cancer keeps coming back, and the pain is unmanageable.
Dalton, the book’s most central figure, begins the novel with an other than honourable discharge, the murky result of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The army was meant to be his way out of poverty and violence – he’d enlisted after getting into some trouble involving having a gun at school. Dalton is also the window Jones uses to open the aperture on some of the systemic failures affecting Appalachia; his discharge from the military sets him up trawl the county looking for work where he lands a position at a coal refinery. He’s tasked with illegally dumping toxic waste into the rivers that run through the mountains and cause cancers and other blights to the people who live there. For the job, Dalton is given a cot in a trailer that he shares with five other men who also work for the company and cash wages amounting to less than minimum wage.
Messy is the moral heart of the novel, abandoned by his family and by the state, bouncing from church camps to foster families. The bond between Dalton and Messy is the throughline for each of the young men, a sense of born-in togetherness that persists even when they go years apart.
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Fancy Gap is a startling study of intergenerational trauma. Each generation of the Fuquay family bears the scars of the one that came before it, and, without spoiling anything, I can tell you the climax involves all the old wounds opening in a satisfying way.
Jones’s use of language is striking in his ability to set a scene of despair or violence with brutal beauty. There’s a cinematic quality to the way he creates images – Grace in a white linen slip, standing on her mountain, preaching a strange gospel rooted in hunger for power after having spent a life with none, or a field of men in variously altered states cleaning guns they hope to put to use, under the watchful eye of a retired priest who understands how to harness unhappiness and anxiety into a productive form of rage.
Fancy Gap is a striking debut, and Jones is a born raconteur.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the character Dalton begins the novel with a dishonourable discharge. He begins the book with an other than honourable discharge.