Watershed Mark Barr (2019)
You can smell the summer heat. Or maybe that’s the sweat and the outhouses and the dust rising off the rutted dirt roads. Rural western Tennessee during the 1930s comes to life magnificently in this novel in which an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.
Although it’s never cited by name, something like the Tennessee Valley Authority is the federal program that descends upon a hardscrabble farming area anchored by a small town, several hours’ drive outside of Memphis. Nathan McReaken, an electrical engineer with a cloudy employment history, arrives to work on a massive hydroelectric dam project. The Great Depression is winding to a close, but all Nathan knows is that jobs are still perilously scarce. His secrets must be stuffed out of sight if he’s to survive an overwhelming workload, a mean-spirited and capricious supervisor, and the Southern heat. Remember, there’s no electricity in his boarding house room to power even a fan.
While Nathan is the consummate outsider in this tale, Claire Dixon is the local. Her hunk of a husband, Travis, works on one of the crews building the dam. When his sex-on-the-side ends up infecting Claire with a sexually transmitted disease, she takes their two children to her mother’s place and goes to recover her health in town with her aunt, who runs the town’s boarding house. Will Claire find a job to support herself as a single mother? Will Nathan’s past cost him his job? Will Nathan and Claire strike up a romance? You get to caring a great deal about these two, whose lives are on the edge of transformation.
The minor characters are equally engaging. Claire's Aunt Irma runs her boarding house with tough love. A seedy moonshiner named Freitag becomes Nathan’s unlikely friend. The unctuously repulsive Robert Hull has the task of signing reluctant farmers up for the electric grid. And a red-haired farm boy who looks forward to light bulbs in his family’s modest home weaves through the plot.
But that heat—expressed in a hundred tiny details, like clothes clinging to the back or hats used to fan the face—pervades everything, conjuring up the rural South in this pre-electric era. “The July afternoon had swelled into full being, the heat pouring over the low hills, finding its way even into the shaded places. It was inescapable, and the day brimmed with the billowing, hot air.” (263) The heat really stokes up the intensity, so that you can place yourself in that rural site of dam construction. Then the characters and the plot development fill it all in.
For fans of historical fiction, Watershed is a winner.
My own grandparents were beneficiaries of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. Read about them, and about American technological progress, in my review of the nonfiction The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J Gordon. For another novel set in the rural South, try Brad Watson’s Miss Jane.