INSIDE THE WOLF, by Amy Rowland
A cycle of “history, suffering, shame, again” rattles through “Inside the Wolf,” Amy Rowland’s wrenching sophomore novel, set in Shiloh, N.C. Awash with grief, Rachel Ruskin, 42 years old and recently denied tenure at a university in New York City, returns to her rural hometown where “everything except beer and mail requires a trip to Greenvale 20 miles away.” Her older brother, Garland, died by a self-inflicted gunshot a year ago, and after that her parents died together in a car accident. Rowland begins her novel at a crossroads fraught with regret and loss.
Fixed between “fruitful solitude or failure’s refuge,” Rachel walks her family’s tobacco field, which “smells sweetest at night, jasmine with a hint of tea leaf.” Here, dreading the “gummy, sweaty back-busting work” of farming and the memories cluttering her family house, Rachel finds a dead wolf. This is no good omen. Something sinister lingers at the borders of both their land and her mind.
Along with the return of red wolves to her tiny hamlet, Rachel must confront a multitude of ghosts. At age 11, she accidentally killed her childhood best friend, a boy she nicknamed Professor, during a game gone wrong. Shortly after her return to Shiloh, another accidental death occurs, leaving behind yet another dead child, and another terminally guilty conscience. Determined to break the cycle, Rachel must reconcile more than just her past. She needs to find her way back into a community she rejected long ago.
Thirty years earlier, Rachel, her brother and Professor sneaked out of the house to search for Joe Brooks, a Black man in the community who was said to have been “decapitated by a train in 1939,” and whose ghost had been spotted at night walking along the local railway tracks by lantern light, searching for his head. The truth is that he was lynched. The truth twisted again when it was decided that Garland, not Rachel, should shoulder the blame for Professor’s death. This lie warps the family.
As Rachel reconnects with her brother’s former girlfriend and their child, with a trio of eccentric, spinster sisters known as the “three little pigs” and with an old flame with a “lupine smile,” Rowland allows living community members, not figures bound by gossip and local mythology, to step forward. Brooks’s living son, Palmer, lays it plain: “People think my father is a ghost story, and I’m here to remind them he was a man.” For Rachel, storytelling is one means of control — either a salvation or a prison. Threaded through her consciousness is a steady reference to nursery rhymes and folklore, the vehicles by which she carries her shame. Desperate for change, Rachel tries in vain to appeal to the town’s greater good, despite knowing that “giving up guns … is giving up the ghost.”
Examining generational trauma in a small Southern town, Rowland made a conscious choice to keep most of the violence off the page in order to concentrate on its aftermath. Rachel often buckles under the burden of untangling fact from fiction, snapping, “We create myths so we can forget the past.” Through Rachel’s professional failure, Rowland wrestles with an author’s ability to confront social ills. When Rachel was denied tenure — her dissertation was titled “From Folklore to Racecraft: The Myth of White Purity in Southern Tales” — one of her mentors remarked, “It will take a lot more real literature and a lot fewer corncobby chronicles to bring this misguided manuscript into contemporary literary debates.” Unlike that tenure committee, Rowland believes that culture is a means to confront the past.
Labeling art as regional diminishes and dismisses its power. Ghost stories and folksy tales, as well as novels, embody a history worth exploring. If the truth is subject to debate, perhaps we’re only left with stories to set us free. “Inside the Wolf” is a vital Southern novel that speaks to a violent American legacy.
Lauren LeBlanc is a book critic whose writing has appeared in The Times, The Boston Globe and The Atlantic, among other publications.
INSIDE THE WOLF | By Amy Rowland | 229 pp. | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill | $27