The Unquiet Earth
The Unquiet Earth completes Denise Giardina’s artistic rendering of a hundred years of the Appalachian coal saga.
Right where Storming Heaven had strewn the pieces of my heart, this novel gathered them back up and kept marching forward.
It resonates with inevitable change - taking us through the Appalachia of the Depression, the Kennedy years, and the advent of surface mining - in that corner of our country where change is amplified to grotesqueness.
The process reveals a great deal about the author’s own experiences, growing up in a coal camp. The younger protagonist, Jackie, becomes disillusioned with her homeland and all its strife, and strikes out for independence as a writer and an activist, but always finding herself drawn back – just like the author.
(Photo: WVhumanities.org)
Giardina continues her method of telling the story from multiple perspectives, smoothing her stride considerably from the last novel. This is a great strength of hers, expressing from within the minds of her characters, who are men and women of all walks of life. Cloaking us in their lives, she imparts an enlightened sympathy.
“I didn’t want any one person to dominate and tell the story,” she told me in an interview. “I had to think about what the voice was going to sound like, before I created each one.”[1]
Drawing from her own memories and accounts she heard from others, Giardina wove her story across a loom that contemporary Appalachians could instantly recognize: from a War on Poverty casting an unwelcome spotlight of pity on the region, to the United Mine Workers slowly losing their foothold, and foretelling tragedy on a biblical scale.
For the people who today remain ensnared in the coalfield Apocalypse, The Unquiet Earth is as relevant today as it was upon its release seventeen years ago.
These two deeply-personal and resounding books represent the author’s literary pilgrimage through a century of her people’s history. Her writing ought to be prayed over, and “prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking,”[2] by many generations of mountain lovers to come.
America knows next to nothing about Appalachian culture, and perhaps expects less from its artists. But Giardina is a defiant exemplar. Her work proves an inimitable confluence of the love for homeland and poetic tale-weaving that exists there.
QUOTATIONS
1. Giardina, Denise. Interview for 16 Blocks Magazine. 06 Feb 2009.
2. Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. Michael Joseph, Penguin Group. 1939.
