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By Robert Morgan
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2000
Robert Morgan's Gap Creek opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of-the-century
Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation--a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited
on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon. "Human life don't mean a thing in this world," she concludes. And who could
blame her? "People could be born and they could suffer, and they could die, and it didn't mean a thing.... The world was exactly
like it had been and would always be, going on about its business." For Julie, that business is hard physical labor. Fortunately,
she's fully capable of working "like a man"--splitting and hauling wood, butchering hogs, rendering lard, planting crops, and
taking care of the stock. Even when Julie meets and marries handsome young Hank Richards, there's no happily-ever-after in store.
Nothing comes easy in Julie Harmon's world, and their first year together is no exception.
Throughout the novel, Morgan chronicles Julie's trials in prose of great dignity and clarity, capturing the rhythms of North
Carolina speech by using only the subtlest of inflections. Clearly the author has done his research too--the descriptions of
physical labor practically leap off the page. (Suffice to say, you'll learn far more about hog slaughtering than you ever dreamed
of knowing.) Yet he resists the temptation to make his long-suffering characters into saints. Julie simmers with resentment at
being her family's workhorse, and Hank flies into a helpless rage whenever he feels that his authority is questioned. In novels
like The Truest Pleasure and The Hinterlands, Morgan proved his ability to create memorable heroines. In Gap Creek, he writes
with great feeling--but not a touch of sentimentality--about a life Julie aptly calls "both simple and hard."
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