‘The Caretaker’ by Ron Rash    (2023) – 252 pages

This poignant affecting novel ‘The Caretaker’ takes place near the eastern Tennessee border in the town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina during the time of the Korean War in 1951. The Hampton family owns the local sawmill and the general store in the town. Their son Jacob Hampton defies his disapproving parents, takes up with a poor uneducated hotel maid Naomi Clarke, elopes with her, and gets her pregnant. His prosperous parents then disinherit him. Now he is called up for military duty in Korea.

Jacob entrusts his friend Blackburn Gant to look after Naomi while he is gone to Korea. Blackburn’s face has been disfigured by polio and the townspeople avoid him. Blackburn works as the caretaker of the town cemetery of Blowing Rock. The isolation of the graveyard position suits Blackburn for one reason: “The dead could do nothing worse to him than the living had already done.” Most of ‘The Caretaker’ is told from Blackburn’s point of view.

Blackburn and Naomi, outcasts for different reasons, form a bond while Jacob is away. Naomi returns to her father’s Tennessee farm. Then Jacob is severely injured in a Korean battle and sent home.

At the center of ‘The Caretaker’ is a massive deception by the well-to-do Hampton parents when Jacob is convinced that Naomi and the baby died in childbirth and Naomi is convinced that Jacob was killed in battle in Korea. Jacob’s friend Blackburn is stuck in the middle of the Hampton parents’ scheme. Let’s just say this is one of the most hurtful deceptive plots that I’ve come across in fiction, and the author Ron Rash convinces us readers that it could happen this way. This is an original plot that is believable since well-to-do parents are so anxious that their children marry the right mates.

‘The Caretaker’ is a fine regional fiction with an original plot. It captures the rural Appalachian landscape, the hills and the trees and the flowers of western North Carolina, as well as the people. Perhaps the best way to capture a land in its essence is to focus on one small area and its people.

The novel also teaches a lesson that many in the United States have seemed to have forgotten. Is it old-fashioned for a novel to have a moral lesson, that having a lot of money tends to corrupt?

Grade :   A