What’s Brandon Nadeau Reading?
A novel with an odd name overran my newsfeeds a while back. I scrolled past it countless times, but it kept popping up until I stabbed it right in the title: Fancy Gap. The internet said it’s a dark story about an Appalachian family afflicted by illness, poverty, and toxic religion. It sounded like an absolute nightmare.
The book arrived a few days later. I tore it from the package and ran my hand across the forested foothills on the cover. A pillar of smoke formed a cloud that shadowed the foreground. A small fire was a gust away from becoming a big problem.
Fancy Gap is Zak Jones’s debut novel. Zak is a dual Canadian-American citizen, literary scholar, and US Army Veteran. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, where he studies veterans’ narratives in American Literature. His short stories have won some awards.
The story begins like a biblical saga, where sins of betrayal sever bloodlines and evildoers are cursed. A family is divided in the prologue. The rest of the book follows their divergent paths.
Nana Grace abandoned the family, moved to a farm in the mountains, and formed a cultish church of apocalyptic Christians. Her congregation is hooked on her provocative sermons and the complimentary dope that accompanies them. Grace’s message of salvation appeals to the forlorn people of Appalachia. Deindustrialization has caused mass unemployment, poverty, and addiction. It’s a hell of a good time for an old-fashioned revival and Grace will be damned if she isn’t the leader.
Jane, Grace’s estranged daughter, is a single mother pursuing a degree and battling breast cancer. Her church supports her, and she’s grateful, but also resents their self-satisfied attitudes. Jane has no friends among the other parishioners. Her benefactor status sets her apart and blocks her path to fellowship. She feels less a person and more a living offering plate, passed around and filled with pocket change, all to certify the flock’s piety. Jane keeps to herself and her wine and pills.
Messiah, Jane’s all-but-silent son, is away at summer camp. He’s a misunderstood teenager that makes no effort to be known, having been mistreated and ostracized for his differences. Messiah opts out of life and exists within himself, ignoring the world to endure it. He wants nothing more than to be with his big brother who left home and joined the army.
Dalton, Jane’s troubled eldest, is homeward bound after his nonconformity earned him an unceremonious discharge from the military. His short career was marked by disciplinary
measures and one violent encounter in the showers. Dalton’s journey back to Fancy Gap is fraught with self-loathing and misfortune. His circuitous route tours the ruins of a dying empire: crumbling infrastructure, industrial wastelands, dilapidated trailers, and so on. He wants to be reunited with Messiah, whom he is ashamed of leaving behind.
Pictured is Brandon Nadeau, whose short story, “The Call of the Void” features in Issue 178.
The novels four core characters are forever discontented, longing to attain or be rid of something, desperate to escape a situation or place. They carry their sense of alienation everywhere they go, and so they never know acceptance. Social isolation warps their worldview over time. They forget what’s real, who they are, and what they value. Their behaviour grows irrational as their mental health declines, reminiscent of Raskolnikov after he axed that pawnbroker.
The author’s Appalachian roots authenticate his depiction of the land and those living on it. Fancy Gap is devoid of cartoonish stereotypes. Its complex characters evolve in compelling ways. Their hardships attack readers across a bridge of emotive prose, there’s no escaping it. But it’s not all grit and sadness, there is also love and redemption—more rewarding as the reader must earn it. Plus, the book is laced with understated wit, though it lurks in the shadows and can be hard to spot in the darkness.
Fancy Gap’s exploration of intergenerational trauma evokes the ghost of Faulkner. The pains of abuse and abandonment are passed on as poisonous heirlooms. Those who inherit them often wander the wilderness of unbelonging. In a land of unbridled despair, these folks are everywhere, alone among each other. Souls in need of a saviour. Prey for the Devil.
Fuel for a fire.
Brandon Nadeau is a writer and the Executive Editor of MoonLit Getaway Literary Journal. His short stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, NōDbMagazine, and others.