[REVIEW] A Shelter of Others, by Charles Dodd White

216 pages, $14.00

Review by Denton Loving

Charles Dodd White returns to the fictional landscape of Sanction County in his new novel, A Shelter of Others. Like his previous publications (the novel Lambs of Men and the story collection Sinners of Sanction County), White masterfully depicts the dark, inner lives of broken characters.

A Shelter of Others centers on Mason Laws, just released from two years in prison for trafficking pills; Mason’s father, Sam, an aging, former college professor; and Mason’s wife, Lavada, who has cared for Sam during Mason’s incarceration. Mason is only begrudgingly grateful for Lavada’s care of his father. More so, he’s hurt and angry that she never visited him even once during his time in prison. When he’s released, he doesn’t let Lavada know. Instead, he ekes out a thin life on an abandoned timber camp until he finds a job at a run-down, one-room store near the college where Sam used to teach.

It becomes understood that the family dynamics of these three were broken well before Mason’s stint in prison. Sam and Mason’s relationship had been strained since Mason’s childhood. And during Mason’s absence and Sam’s deteriorating mental health, Lavada realizes that, for various reasons, she has grown to love Sam:

“…in a way his own natural born son never had. Sam had said to her once that sadness was the price men and women paid for being good. She saw the pain that set itself in Sam, made itself adjunctive to his good heart. She wondered if the curse strong people faced was in their ability to endure too much. Or perhaps it was not even that so much as the fact that eventually others must witness what the suffering makes of what they once were. Regardless, the trials they had passed through had made her and Sam closer, joined them like night and day welded fast at the horizon.”

Of all the reasons Lavada loves and cares for Sam, their combined sadness is one of the greatest. Those who have read any of White’s other work will know that he won’t ever be accused of writing a happy book. Sorrow and loss sit in the very core of all his characters. These are profoundly wounded individuals, and when sorrow runs this deep, it’s sometimes impossible to identify its source. In reference to Mason, White writes, “He did not know what sorrow he was weeping for. He feared, above all, that it was not his own.”

Equally akin to sadness are hatred and love, the one being the close friend of the other. White writes, “Hating Mason is what sealed her (Lavada’s) devotion to him.”

When reading A Shelter of Others, it’s clear that White knows the landscape he’s writing about. Though he uses fictionalized place names, White’s writing follows in the footsteps of fellow Carolinian Ron Rash in ensuring the importance of place in story. Every scene of this novel is located in a setting that lives and breathes on the page. The natural landscapes that make up Sanction County are not merely beautiful. They are also the places where these broken characters come closest to finding any sense of redemption. More than once, Sam flees Lavada’s care in order to go to the river or the top of the mountain. In one of the most poignant scenes of the novel, Mason goes fishing with his friend Irving, a man who is as physically damaged as the rest of the characters are emotionally damaged:

“Mason helped him down to the edge, mud blooming in the shallows around their ankles. He could feel fear in Irving, a sense conveyed through touch alone, but unmistakable, living. His hands on the old man were urgent and quiet songs. When they entered deeper water Irving calmed, the river meeting around them, enclosing them in a single shared space. The current had its own fluent voice. They moved toward it together like men sentenced.”

The Laws family home is a remote cabin where Sam raised Mason and where Mason later brought Lavada to live after they were married. “Lavada marveled that this place had not always belonged to her. How had she come to find it so native, so integral to every concern and consideration when she was not born to it?” As if in answer to this question, White writes, “The truth of the place made its truth in you.”

What thickens the plot of this novel is not Mason’s release from prison but, rather, a young deputy named Cody Gibbs, three years back from the war in Iraq. When Mason fails to report to the sheriff’s office during his period of probation, Gibbs takes creative measures to find him. At times, Cody is a devoted enforcer of the law, well-meaning and principled. At other times, he’s a barely-hidden psychopath who should have never been issued a badge or gun. Despite this complexity of his character, it’s Gibbs’ actions that set off a series of events which push these characters against each other, as well as against the elements of the natural world in which they live, forever changing all of their lives.

***

Denton Loving lives near the historic Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia converge. He serves as editor of drafthorse: the literary journal of work and no work and volume 4 of the Motif Anthology Series. His fiction is forthcoming in River Styx and Flyleaf. Follow him on twitter @DentonLoving.