Knoxville author Catherine Landis’s second novel, Harvest, tackles the complex subjects of Appalachian identity, land conservation, the disappearance of family farming, and the corporate greed associated with suburban sprawl. Harvest is also about the displacement and demise of an Appalachian family. And without imposing herself on the narrative or falling into polemics, Landis skillfully comments on these heady subjects while giving readers one of the most memorable character studies to appear in recent Appalachian fiction. Told from the point of view of three main characters, Harvest is what Landis calls “a testament to changes in East Tennessee over the last century and a lament for losing land to bulldozers.”
The novel opens near Norris, Tennessee, in 1933 as the Tennessee Valley Authority is preparing to build a dam. Six-year-old Arliss Greene is helping his immediate and extended families prepare for the forced move from their community (ironically called New Hope) to a new farm in northern Knox County, Tennessee. He leaves New Hope “riding backwards on top of a loaded wagon,” visualizing his birthplace underwater: “He imagined fish swimming in and out of the gaping windows of the house, . . . pictured tree limbs bending to river currents instead of the wind.”
Within the span of 36 pages, Landis covers that many years in Arliss Greene’s life. Readers may balk at moving so fast, but Landis’ narrative strategy symbolizes the quickness and absoluteness in which Arliss loses his birthright, childhood, and several family members. By age 14, Arliss has willingly stepped into the grinding labor of cattle farmer, working compulsively, becoming “the kind of farmer who kept the grass around his fence rows short and neat, his barn spotless, his machinery clean and running.”
By the late 1970s Arliss and his wife Merle have two grown sons. Merle is a “loud, clumsy” woman, rigid in her “made-up mind” about the world and totally indifferent to Arliss’ dedication as farmer. The Greene sons show no interest in or respect for farm work either. The older son moves to Atlanta and becomes a land developer. The younger son Daniel and his wife Leda are the other two narrators in Landis’s story.
Daniel, a fidgety but imaginative child, grows up with a love of baseball and literature. From an early age, Daniel dismisses his father as ignorant and wrong-headed. He abhors farming and works hard at shedding his own “farm boy” image around other kids.
After an unfortunate series of disasters, Daniel and Leda are forced to move onto the Greene farm where Daniel attempts to complete his dissertation on Sut Lovingood—the quintessential Appalachian fool, created by another Knoxville writer, George Washington Harris, in 1867. As Appalachian scholar Jack Higgs suggests: Sut Lovingood, “the most complete fool in American letters,” symbolizes independence and personal freedom while reminding us of our human frailties and limitations. Like many a character in Harris’s stories, Sut Lovingood is Daniel’s undoing. Daniel’s life becomes embattled, much like the preacher who cries out after Sut sends the lizards up his pants legs: “Pray fur me brethren an’ sisteren, fur I is a-rastilin wif the great inimy right now!” Daniel alone, however, is his own great enemy. He toys with Appalachian culture but rejects his own Appalachian heritage; he tries to be a writer but refuses to consider that his father’s story might be worthy of retelling. His wife says, “Daniel had spent so much time studying Sut Lovingood, he had missed the bigger story, the one about a real Appalachian life that lived right next door.” Daniel fails as scholar, writer, teacher; he abandons projects in mid-course; eventually his family crumbles and is once more displaced.
Leda, meanwhile, as mother to two children and long-suffering wife to Daniel and his increasingly bizarre and erratic behavior, eventually finds liberation and meaning for her life. She becomes Arliss’s unlikely farm hand when he shows up on her porch one day and asks, “Can you help me for a minute?” Slowly learning the intricate details of successful farming and finding enfranchisement in steady, hard labor, Leda comes to understand a heritage Daniel denies, a belief articulated in the beginning of the novel by Arliss’s father: “At least when you’ve got land, you’re the one to say what’s what.”
Unfortunately, in the end, Leda does not become the one to say what’s what, and like Arliss before her, is displaced and uprooted. The Greene’s rural farm on Bearpen Lane in northern Knox County slowly becomes bombarded with the constant roar of machinery cutting trees and roads for subdivisions, the “red, muddy scars of earth never meant to be laid open, and the thin boards of cheap houses piling up like litter.” Worse, there is now a Wal-Mart within view of the farm. The oldest Greene son calls it a “booming, happening part of town,” with its “fast-food restaurants and sit-down restaurants with clever names and gas stations and movie theaters and home improvement stores and home furnishing stores and office supply stores and real estate offices and bank branches and copying stores and eyeglasses stores and shoe stores and dry cleaners and newly-widened roads already jammed with traffic.” It’s the saddest part of this novel.
Although Leda experiences personal growth and learns the power of heritage and memory, her journey is solitary. She never gets any help from the Greene family: “She wondered, now that Arliss was older, if it would mean more to him to remember, and to remember out loud, so that somebody else might hear and remember what she heard.” But on those occasions when Leda does ask Arliss about the memories of his mountain heritage, she is met only with stubborn silence. Arliss Greene buries his emotional losses with the same finality that the man-made lake at Norris buried over 40,000 acres.
In Harvest, Catherine Landis delivers a complicated, compelling, character-driven novel and a meditative mourning on one rural East Tennessee family farm that becomes “an island in an asphalt sea.”