The Weight of This World
There was no breeze, just heat, like all the air had been sucked out of this place and all that was left was that temperature that bore down on everything. All the weight of this world seemed to be on him right then and he just stood there staring out into nothing at all, unsure how much longer he could go without buckling beneath it.
The Weight of This World is compulsively readable, and being a slim volume, I went through it fairly quickly, the whole time thinking, “This is great”. The sentences are finely written, the plot is tense, and gruesome events happen frequently with a goosebumpy, gritty realism. But now that it's done I'm thinking, “Was that great?” I don't know that the plot holds up to scrutiny, and in the end, it felt a bit exploitative; like Hillbilly poverty porn. Do people live like this? And if they do, should I be mining their experiences for my own entertainment? This book feels like a guilty pleasure, minus the lingering pleasure.
It wasn't just possums and coons that learned to eat what's left behind, that learned to make meals off scraps picked from bone. A man who spends enough time at the bottom learns to do the same. They were all alike in that way. Everything was feeding off another. It's the scavengers that turn predators to prey, he thought, and if a person can't see that, he's probably the one being taken.
Set in the Appalachian Hill Country of North Carolina, the story is told from the alternating viewpoints of twenty-four year old Thad – an Afghanistan War vet who returned from his service broken in body and spirit – and his best friend Aiden – an out of work labourer who has lived in a trailer with Thad since his own parents died when he was a boy. With no jobs and no prospects, the pair strip abandoned houses of their copper wiring to sell for scrap, and while Aiden would love to save up enough money to escape the rut their lives have become, Thad needs the money to buy the meth that clears his mind; as always, where Thad leads, Aiden follows. Having set up the pair as a couple of sketchy characters living on the margins of a sketchy community, when a too-good-to-be-true opportunity lands in their laps, Thad and Aiden naturally pursue it to tragic lengths.
There was wickedness in this world that swallowed any light that might've been, darkness that could be answered only with darkness.
I understand the mix of hopelessness and apathy that make Thad and Aiden believe that they'll never rise above the White Trash label they've earned in their community, and while author David Joy does a good job of adding those wasting-away peripheral characters that are true “dope” fiends, I don't know if I buy the main characters as casual self-medicating meth users – and especially as their drug use compels them to uncharacteristic acts of violence; I couldn't tell if I was supposed to think that they are basically good men who never had a chance, or bad men living out their destiny. I've read plenty of books that show how a couple of bad decisions set events in motion that lead to an inevitable downfall (and when done well, that's a satisfying journey of tension and release), but with The Weight of This World, it felt like either Thad or Aiden could have walked away at any time; nothing was inevitable, and that felt unsatisfying.
The line between good and evil was fine as frog hair.
Ultimately, this book did have an interesting plot that held my attention until the very end, and at the sentence level, I thought the writing was finely crafted. And yet it doesn't add up to much: there are no lessons learned, no empathy created, no social crisis exposed. I read a book about poor mountain people who made bad choices and messed up their lives, and I'm left not feeling much of anything.
