Soil: A Novel, by Jamie Kornegay
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Soil: A Novel, by Jamie Kornegay
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In this darkly comic, “promising debut from an assured new voice in Southern fiction” (Library Journal), an idealistic young farmer moves his family to a Mississippi flood basin, suffers financial ruin—and becomes increasingly paranoid he’s being framed for murder.It all begins with a simple dream. An ambitious young environmental scientist hopes to establish a sustainable farm on a small patch of land nestled among the Mississippi hills. Jay Mize convinces his wife Sandy to move their six-year-old son away from town and to a rich and lush parcel where Jacob could run free and Jay could pursue the dream of a new and progressive agriculture for the twenty-first century. Within a year he’d be ruined. When the corpse appears on his family’s property, Jay is convinced he’s being set up. And so beings a journey into a maze of misperceptions and personal obsessions, as the farmer, his now-estranged wife, a predatory deputy, and a backwoods wanderer, all try to uphold a personal sense of honor. By turns hilarious and darkly disturbing, Soil traces one man’s apocalypse to its epic showdown in the Mississippi mudflats. “The Coen brothers meets Flannery O’Connor. It’s definitely Gothic, it’s definitely dark, but at the same time, it is hilarious and heartbreaking” (Kyle Jones, NPR). Drawing on elements of classic Southern noir, dark comedy, and modern dysfunction, Jamie Kornegay’s novel is about the gravitational pull of one man’s apocalypse and the hope that maybe, just maybe, he can be reeled in from the brink. “Dig your hands into this Soil to find gutty and peppery writing, an almost recklessly bold imagination, audacious empathy, and a story so twisty and volatile that nearly every turn feels electrifyingly unexpected” (Jonathan Miles, award-winning author of Want Not and Dear American Airlines).
Soil: A Novel, by Jamie Kornegay - Amazon Sales Rank: #380580 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-10
- Released on: 2015-03-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Soil: A Novel, by Jamie Kornegay Review “Let us stand, brothers and sisters, to applaud the arrival of an exquisitely deranged new voice to American fiction. Dig your hands into this Soil to find gutty and peppery writing, an almost recklessly bold imagination, audacious empathy, and a story so twisty and volatile that nearly every turn feels electrifyingly unexpected. This rough-n-tumble model of Southern literature—the vehicle of choice for the late greats Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and William Gay—has felt stalled on the roadside for several years now; Jamie Kornegay just pulled up with some big-ass jumper cables.” —Jonathan Miles, author of Want Not and Dear American Airlines"Jamie Kornegay's novel Soil heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice. This book is atmospheric 'as all get-out,' as my grandmother might have said, and it crackles with intensity. It's everything I want a novel to be, a fine story well-told with characters I won't forget, set in a world so real you can smell it and taste it. Kornegay's something special." –Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances"Mississippi has done it again, given us yet another brilliant writer. Welcome, Jamie Kornegay, to a long line of kick-ass storytellers. Soil is one of the most memorable novels I've read in years, with a killer story told in killer language. Highly, highly recommended." —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter“Jamie Kornegay's prose is as rich and fertile as the Mississippi Delta landscape that spreads across the pages of Soil. It is poetic, both in its language and in the soulful complexity of its characters, all of them fallen and trudging along the hard worn path of redemption on dirty hands and knees.” —Michael F. Smith, author of Rivers“Marked by wry humor, unforgettable characters, and riveting suspense, Jamie Kornegay’s Soil is a spellbinding Greek tragedy played out against the backdrop of the choked river-bottoms, sprawling fields, and dusty roads of the Mississippi Delta. A brilliant, haunting portrait of the havoc one desperate man’s decisions and dreams can wreak upon himself and those around him. This remarkable novel springs from rich earth indeed, and the end result is a book that will leave readers reeling.” —Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter, and The Southern Cross“A darkly droll, epic novel told in a style I’d have to call a deceptively swift amble through a most vividly rendered, watery Delta world. Anyone from Coleridge to Twain to Faulkner to William Gay would have loved reading this book, and you will, too.” —Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives"Jamie Kornegay's powerful debut novel, Soil, is just as rich, dark and primal as the title suggests and it is hard not to discuss the various characters' plights without slipping into metaphor as they both literally and figuratively dig and tunnel and turn up all that is buried. This novel is brimming with suspense while continuously locating the fine line separating good from evil. Just as the soil delivers all that is decomposed and lost, it also brings promise of future growth and in this case, it is in the form of the protagonist's son. Kornegay's rendering of hope and innocence against the backdrop of depravity and darkness is admirable and moving." —Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life after Life"Kornegay's skillful writing keeps the story gripping and the atmosphere haunting." —Kirkus Reviews"Kornegay imbues his characters with depth and his story with suspense, but the real star of the book is the pungent and foreboding Mississippi earth itself. A promising debut from an assured new voice in Southern fiction.” —Library Journal“Kornegay's keenly observed novel is a bit of a slow burner at first, but it soon builds into a page-turning crescendo and a suspense-filled finale which will make your heart pound and leave you opened-mouthed in horror.” —Western Gazette“This marvelous bookresembles the Southern Gothic novels of the past such as the classic EternalFire by Calder Willingham.”—Smoky Mountain News
About the Author Jamie Kornegay lives in the Mississippi Delta, where he moved in 2006 to establish an independent bookstore, Turnrow Book Co. Before that he was a bookseller, events coordinator, and radio show producer at the famous Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi. He studied creative fiction under Barry Hannah at the University of Mississippi. Soil is his first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Soil 1 Before the flood, a stouthearted young couple was putting down roots in the nearby town of Madrid, where they’d settled after college—a man, his wife, and their young son. They painstakingly refurbished a house and planted an attractive garden in the back, where the father let the toddler dig and explore and pluck green tomatoes too soon from the vine. Smiles were never absent from their thankful faces, and if there were troubles then no one bothered to recall them. But a young man, especially one so clever, will grow restless and sometimes throw away everything when he turns elsewhere to affirm his life’s purpose. The trouble started with compost. He first began making and experimenting with it for his job in soil management at the local Farm Service Agency. He started small, a few wooden bins in the backyard of the home on Nutt Street. He collected kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, raked leaves and grass clippings. He spread one ingredient over the next in lasagna layers, sprayed them down with the water hose, and turned the piles regularly with a garden fork. If properly maintained, the compost would actually become hot to the touch and would belch plumes of steam when stirred on cold mornings. He loved the earthy smell that rose from the mounds, the whiff of rot and fiber, the way the soil broke and fluffed a little more each day. Here was nature at work, made more efficient by man’s guiding hand. He began to judge everything for its recyclability. All matter was either carbon or nitrogen. Soon he was collecting bags of lawn debris from neighborhood curbs and canvassing farms for straw bales and manure. He sorted leaves by species, made flowcharts of dung potency. Bins and mounds multiplied as he tinkered with ratios and tested fertility. He tilled up every square inch of backyard and planted vegetables and herbs, lined the front walk and driveway with big terra-cotta pots, each plot a test patch for some specially formulated recipe. When he submitted a sample to a USDA-sanctioned exhibition, earning the highest marks in soil friability, nutrient retention, and water solubility, the local newspaper caught wind of it and dubbed him Compost Man. This gave his colleagues a good laugh. Even his wife joked to their friends about his growing “mudballs” out back and said she’d prefer him sneaking off with her lingerie catalogs than ogling the seed brochures the way he did. One morning he walked out back to turn the piles and found that someone had laid a cruel turd atop one of his prize mounds. It was definitely human. The stench was complex and he found a fast-food napkin with brown streaks nearby. He couldn’t believe the audacity. They’d just hopped up on the bin, draped themselves over the corner, and let one rip. He paced the back porch and spent hours at the window, profiling every neighbor who walked by with a pet. Every jogger, every biker, every long-haired mischievous teen. What was this compulsion to foul something so pure and constructive? Who was deranged enough to do such a thing? He walked out back with his hammer and studded the rims of each bin with nails. Next time someone came snooping pants-down in the dark, they’d pay with blood. His colleagues thought it was a hilarious prank. Even his wife suggested gently that he was taking it too hard. “We eat out of that soil, for God’s sake!” he replied. “You want to end up in the hospital with a bacterial infection? Can you see our little son, dead from E. coli poisoning?” She was skeptical of this, but he scoured the internet to prove the causes and insufficient cures of various bacteria and infections, moving on from there to viruses, superbugs, pandemics, extinction events. The deeper he dug, the more perils he uncovered. Likewise the prank grew epic in his imagination. It was a pointed statement—“I shit on your life”—made by a lone creep and endorsed by a society that deemed him irrelevant. Somehow the smallest things can break a man, and the hairline fracture deep within the young scientist spread over the next several months. It did not depress him or slow his obsession but rather excited his research, leading to more compost mounds and more outlandish experiments. He upset the whole neighborhood when he planted a late-season crop of corn right there in the front yard. His wife was horrified by bean and cucumber vines planted in the rain gutters, cascading down like gaudy Christmas decorations. “You’re turning our beautiful home into a feedlot,” she accused him. He read incessantly and became an expert on diverse farming techniques from ancient to modern civilizations. His interpretation of historical patterns convinced him that poor soil management had led to the downfall of societies throughout time. He relayed all of these findings to his farmer clients and expounded on the hazards of modern farming. They were hidebound men who planted cotton, soybeans, and corn as their families had for generations, trying to eke out modest livings against increasingly volatile world markets. Times were tough enough. They had no use for antiquarian farming theories promoted by some arrogant, pencil-pushing upshot. Nor did they appreciate his accusations that they were squandering the soil by leaching it with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, casting a blight upon the land and rivers and seas with their shortsighted and unsustainable methods, virtually ensuring that their grandchildren, along with everyone else’s, would wander the famished countryside like starving refugees in a desert of poisoned dust. All they wanted from him was help filling out subsidy applications and disaster relief forms. The soil scientist grew bitter and withdrawn. He felt rather like a young suburban Moses, entrusted with critical information from on high that the general rabble was too distracted to glean. The agency confirmed this by requesting his resignation. Their idyllic life threatened, his wife went back to school to get her teaching degree while he stayed home with the boy. But he did not mope and feel sorry for himself. Just before his forced retirement, the young farmer had attended a regional ag conference where he heard a lecture on advances in hydro- and aeroponic technology delivered by a famous environmental scientist who made the stunning admission “Plants don’t actually need soil to grow. Just a fissure for their roots to spread and soak up moisture and nourishment.” It was an offhanded remark, on the way to a larger point, but to the soil scientist it felt like an atom bomb. The statement was so simple and staggering, so obvious. Soil-free farming. Why had he never seen it? Look at the bonsais and cacti in their rock gardens, the weeds growing up from cracks in the sidewalk. His imagination vaulted years ahead to farms that operated indoors, fields stacked one atop the next in glass high-rises, each floor its own crop grown in recycled water and mineral baths. He saw farmers in white lab coats appraising the beautiful plants, no bugs or blemishes, no sweat or sunburn, not a speck of dirt in sight. The future will be spotless! Hoes and plows became droppers and beakers. Computers monitored optimal growing conditions. All of the equipment was powered by the sun and the wind, a perfect organic machine. The greatest pitfalls of agriculture—pestilence and disease, the unpredictability of weather, poisonous pollutants and industrial runoff—could be solved by making the whole process simpler, cleaner, and more efficient. He could build it and lead the innovation. He could make the world healthier and more peaceful. There was no time to waste. To proceed authentically, he would have to start from the ground up. He searched for a piece of land, spent two months sorting through overpriced and unsuitable plots until he found a house with seventeen acres twenty miles south of town. It had been a rental property for years, but the owners had come on hard times and were looking to unload it quickly. The house was a charmless pile of bricks compared to their town cottage, and the backyard was full of castaway equipment and scrap. The fields were grown over, all scrub and marsh and raw potential. Beyond the house was pastureland and forest, even a river, the wild and portentous Tockawah River, which ran along the southwestern edge of the property and would serve as a constant source of irrigation. It was the perfect site for his experiment. All of it could be his for a song. He composed his pitch and approached his wife. She listened to him describe the experiments and the laboratory and the farm tower he would erect, how he intended to produce enough fresh food to supply the local population—“Not a farm so much as a growing system, indifferent to the whims of markets and nature.” The way he described it and the completeness of his vision revealed a surprising logic born from his craze, and she became seduced a little. She wondered about the home they’d made, the comforts they’d earned. Couldn’t they live in town and start a farming business on the side? The start-up capital to make this dream a reality required both the proceeds from the Nutt Street house and the inheritance she’d recently received from her stepmother, an unexpected gift which might have been wisely spent paying off student loans or starting a college fund for the boy. “What better way to prepare a boy than to raise him in the country?” he asked. Teach a boy to hunt, fish, and farm, and you’ve paved the way for an honest, salt-of-the-earth man to live free come hell or high water. She got a far-off look in her eye. Could she see it all before her, just as he had? Or was she scared to say no, knowing that if she kept her husband and his ambition shackled here she risked losing the very things she loved? She had faith in him and his passion. He was asking her to double down on their young fortune. They took the leap together and spent some of the best days of their marriage in this shared endeavor. A year later they were ruined.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful. A BEST OF 2015 By Mallory Heart Reviews REVIEW: SOIL by Jamie KornegayAn electrifying thriller; a Kafkaesque narrative of a once young man's descent into madness, into a paranoia in which humanity and all of Nature are sure to be turned against him; a marvel of psychology; a lyrical exposition of region and character; and a vivid portraiture of a locale. All of this and so much more is SOIL, a story compelling from the first sentences, constantly demanding our attention, yet oh so rewarding. If you.loved as I.did the lyrical nuances and perfect characterization of 2014's A SUDDEN LIGHT, then here is your "best of" 2015.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Crime and Punishment in Mississippi By Deborah 3.5 starsI just read a book called Judging a Book by Its Lover, in which Lauren Leto provides five-word slogans to summarize books by a variety of classic and contemporary authors. (My favorite: William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury = "Dilsey saved all their asses.") My five-word summary of Jamie Kornegay's Soil? Crime and Punishment in Mississippi.To be fair, Kornegay expects the comparison; at one point, we learn that our protagonist, Jay Mize, has "a dog-eared Dostoevsky" on his bookshelf. Unlike Raskolnikov, however, Jay hasn't actually killed anyone, so his building paranoia, lacking any grounding in a guilty conscience, appears to be the product of mental illness. Narratives about the mentally ill can be interesting, as Soil is, but they generally do not lead the reader to identify with or inhabit the skin of a character in the way that great literature does. At bottom, Soil doesn't ask anything of the reader; it is the reading equivalent of an episode of Hoarders.The reader's attempt to relate to Jay is further hampered by a massive sub-plot in which one of Jay's suspected pursuers, Sheriff's Deputy Danny Shoals, falls in lust with Jay's estranged wife Sandy. (The explanation for Shoals's vanity license plate, SUGAR, is particularly cringe-inducing.) While Shoals's pursuit of his wife does lend credence to Jay's advancing paranoia, Kornegay could have accomplished his purpose without all of the details about Shoals's sexual proclivities.At the beginning of the book, we are charmed by Jay's obsession with the soil, with his desire to create the best environment in which to grow food after what he sees as the coming environmental apocalypse. By the end, however, we are merely dispassionate observers of a crumbling mind.TRIGGER WARNING: Dogs were killed during the writing of this book.I received a free copy of Soil through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful. A paranoid survivalist self-destructs By TChris Jay Mize, a young soil scientist in Mississippi who is too aggressive in his advocacy of sustainable farming methods, loses his job with the local Farm Service Agency. Jay (mockingly known as "Compost Man") is a closet survivalist who believes he needs to make his family self-sustaining. An epiphany sends Jay chasing a dream of soil-free farming. Some people are better off not having epiphanies and Jay is one of them.Shortly after his farmland floods and his wife, Sandy, returns to the city with their son, Jay finds a dead body in a newly formed lake that was once his field. Allowing paranoia to get the better of him -- paranoia that is perhaps inspired by the county's reaction to his notorious grandfather -- Jay decides that notifying Deputy Shoals, who came by two weeks earlier in search of a missing person, would be exactly the wrong thing to do.Shoals is the novel's other key character. He is making it his mission to take every reasonably attractive female he meets to bed ... or, more likely, to the backseat of his Mustang. He would like to add Sandy to his list of conquests. Shoals, whose vigorous sex drive is combined with the maturity level of a twelve-year-old, adds comic relief to a novel that is often darkly humorous. Soil also derives a fair amount of humor from Jay's whacky doomsday theories -- "what if someone sets loose a fleet of self-replicating nanorobots?" -- the kinds of scenarios that hardcore survivalists secretly hope for so they can get some use out of their bug-out bags.Most of the novel focuses on the consequences of Jay's unending supply of bad decisions. It is difficult to know whether Jay is stupid or noble in his unwillingness to accept defeat. Clearly he is a bit unhinged. Despite being a scientist, his life is an "equation without logic, or else the logic of nature, which he hardly understood." I imagine many readers will dislike Soil because they dislike Jay, who displays few admirable qualities. I found him to be a sympathetic character notwithstanding his insanely poor judgment and questionable mental health. Even Shoals is easy to understand and forgive, if not to admire. Neither of the central characters have a bad heart despite their bad behavior. It is, of course, easiest to sympathize with Sandy, who has to cope with Jay and Shoals while trying to do what's best for her son.While I wouldn't classify Soil as a thriller, Jamie Kornegay creates an atmosphere of mild tension from beginning to end. The story moves quickly but Kornegay doesn't skimp on characterization. Even minor characters (most of whom belong in the deep woods where they live) are easy to visualize. I didn't quite buy the ending, which seems a bit too easy. In hindsight, I'm not sure I buy any of Jay's actions, but Kornegay convinced me of their reality as I was reading and that's all that matters. In the end, Kornegay tells an original and entertaining story in pleasing prose, which is more than most authors manage.
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