While they were busy working, tilling fields, and fixing cars, the American Dream went and changed right out from under many of America’s citizens, with little more than the flick of a magician’s wrist. Instead of hard work, no work became the goal, and instead of a lifetime of achievement earning a well-deserved rest, hitting the jackpot for early retirement became the endgame. The old dream sits rotting in the fields like the government-purchased bales of hay that open The New Valley, a triptych of novellas by Josh Weil.

From the first pages, one has the sense that as soon as the men at the heart of these stories gain some self-awareness, trouble awaits. The first novella, “Ridge Weather,” opens with the line, “It was the hay bales that did it.” The sight of that hay is the last straw for Osby Caudill’s depression, and also doubles as a reason for his father’s suicide. Cortland Caudill’s life’s work had been bought by the government for no other reason than to let it sit there. The other characters in The New Valley seem to be in much the same position.

Each of these stories is about men left behind by time, and so, rather than focusing on the future, they have to look back and try to rescue what they can. For Osby, a young steer paralyzed by disease becomes his cause. In “Stillman Wing,” the title character attempts to rebuild an old tractor as time passes by in an increasingly confusing manner. Geoff Sarver, the mildly retarded narrator of the final novella, “Sarverville Remains,” tries to make amends to a man in prison whose wife he fell in love with. As Geoff puts it, “Sometimes a person can’t even know hisself till someone else figures him out, and then he got to look at her who’s figured him and see in her what she knows before he can know it too.”

For each of these men, there’s a reminder that the world is accelerating faster than they can understand. Osby takes on a boarder, a young man from the local college who is studying kenaf, a hardy hemp-like crop, of which he says, “It’s going to revolutionize agriculturally based economies in regions of the country like this one.” The young man’s energy baffles Osby: “His eyes looked like they were powered by something completely foreign to Osby, completely different from whatever it was inside him.”

Josh Weil

One of Weil’s many deft tricks is to make Stillman’s descent into dementia affecting and effective—no histrionics, no speeches. Things just stop making sense. In the depths of a hazy depression and a mind that can hold less and less as the days go on, Stillman chants along with one of his chi gong tapes, “I am the happiest person in the world!” and it is absolutely and utterly devastating.

As The New Valley unfolds and one novella gives way to another, the requirements of the writing get more complicated. Osby’s story unfolds more or less in real time, but time starts to blur under the gaze of Stillman’s macro loupe, used at first for fine engine work and then as glasses, until it is obscured altogether in Geoff’s limited viewpoint. Weil’s major talent—and it is major—lies in making the gears and levers of the book operate seamlessly, like the engines and equipment that litter its pages. He writes with little pretense or adornment, content to let the story come to him. And crucially, unlike some examinations of marginalized people, The New Valley does not feel exploitative or condescending. Every word feels necessary.

Weil’s keen observational eye brings the smallest details of the lives of these three men to light, and their acuity makes his other analyses gleam with truth. He writes of Osby, “It was like he wasn’t even meant to be a person. He would have been better off an animal, communicate by raising the hairs on his head or putting off some kind of smell.” This particular observation echoes a few pages later, when Osby notes as he pulls into his driveway, “It seemed perfectly possible that his father’s squashed-looking, wrinkly head might be there above the headrest, close-cropped white hair prickling on his scalp like cactus spines. Osby breathed hard out his nose.”

Despite the comparisons, the men of The New Valley aren’t animals. Nor are they machinery, the other comparison Weil often has them draw. Weil himself makes the reader all too aware of their humanity, and their emotions and heartbreak give this book a quiet heaviness, like the Blue Ridge Mountains that loom in the background.

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Tinkers

When George Washington Crosby, one of the novel’s two protagonists, hallucinates on his deathbed, he sees the house he built himself collapsing on top of him:

“The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing (the capped pipes never joined to the sink and toilet he had once intended to install) and racks of old coats and boxes of forgotten board games and puzzles and broken toys and bags of family pictures—some so old they were exposed on tin plates—all of it came crashing down into the cellar, he unable to even raise a hand to protect his face.”

Several times, Harding compares the wires to veins and the insulation to tongues, driving home the meaning: the objects in this world are as alive and precious and detailed as their owners, and if one is known, so is the other.

George’s father, Howard Aaron Crosby, makes his living matching people to objects, driving a wooden wagon full of goods to homes and farms too solitary to obtain them any other way. But, as becomes apparent as the book goes on, wandering and willingness to be distracted are Howard’s true trade:

“Besides fixing pots and selling soap, these are some of the things that Howard did at one time or another on his rounds, sometimes to earn extra money, mostly not: shoot a rabid dog, deliver a baby, put out a fire, pull a rotten tooth, cut a man’s hair, sell five gallons of home-made whiskey for a backwoods bootlegger named Potts, fish a drowned child from the creek.”

We watch the father walk the earth with a sprightliness and a sense of humor that arrives as a welcome reprieve from the death watch over George taking place in the novel’s more recent past. It’s a striking, backward tack: When Howard returns home, encountering young George is somewhat like encountering a ghost, and it is George who plays the part of father, calming his brother with his blanket and his sisters with a cold cloth to the forehead and a trip to bed, respectively. In contrast, Howard here is the flawed younger man who takes every side road and collects flowers for his wife instead of selling his wares.

Howard also suffers from epilepsy, an affliction he and his wife, Kathleen, hide from the children. George witnesses his father’s illness only once, at a Christmas dinner, and he attempts to help, getting his fingers nearly bitten off in the process. In his old age, George’s body betrays him as well, turning him into the equivalent of one of the objects he tends to. The failings of the human machinery fascinate Harding as much as the beauty of a field in the late afternoon or a pond in the quiet of the woods:

“Lack of exercise may have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist.”

Tinkers does not have a plot in the traditional sense. Instead, Harding winds the gears and cogs of memories and experiences and lets them turn for the reader’s consideration. The story comes in layers and images, the recollections of a dying man who, like Harding, is in no hurry to get where he’s going. This excellent debut proves Harding to be a writer of exceptional poise, possessing clear-eyed skill and, like his characters, a steady hand for the finest of details.

**

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