Genesis Road
by Susan O’Dell Underwood
Madville Publishing, $22.95 paperback, 342 pages
According to John Gardner, there are only two basic plots: a stranger comes to town; someone goes on a journey. In this fine first novel by poet Susan O’Dell Underwood (The Book of Awe, Iris Press), Glenna Daniels and her oldest, best friend, Carey, take to the road, some nine thousand miles of it, after a series of misfortunes. Carey is still mourning the death of his husband Stan two years before, and Glenna is grieving a devastating miscarriage, an impending divorce from her third husband, and the loss of her house to a fire set by her abusive, alcoholic father, who perishes in the blaze. But like all flights from the journey becomes a road to, from the disasters of the past to healing and the possibility of new life.
The lovingly restored house in Knoxville that Glenn Daniels burns to the ground in an unwelcome attempt to rewire a ceiling fan is not the first home of Glenna’s that he’s destroyed. When she was ten, to get herself and her children away from his abuse, Glenna’s mother, Faye, fled her farm on Genesis Road at the foot of English Mountain in Tennessee, to a trailer in Newport, and out of spite or in a twisted attempt to prove his love or perhaps both, Glenn torched the farmhouse. Though Faye divorces him, she takes him back, and Glenna grows up in a trailer she hates with a father who is both charming and cruel. Not until she is in high school, when he holds a pistol to her head and beats her so severely he breaks her ribs, does Glenna escape his physical abuse by moving to her Granny Pearl’s, but the psychological wounds are deep and her feelings for her father so complex that as a girl she can will him dead and as an adult be haunted by guilt for her parting words on the day he barges in to rewire her fan: “We would always, always have been better off without you.” Over and over she imagines his incinerated body as she and Carey traverse the American West, torn between fury and regret.
The Bible has plenty to say about fire, and the burned houses are not the last we hear of conflagration, for Glenna and Carey will encounter landscapes scarred by fires long out or altered by the liquid heat of lava. A raging wildfire forces them to drive hundreds of miles out of their way to Yosemite. They’re no stranger to floods either—sudden storms, monsoons that turn the desert to a treacherous ooze of mud—and it is no coincidence that Glenna will find the hope of healing at a daycare in Knoxville called Noah’s Ark. Nor is it a coincidence that her lost Eden, the childhood next to nature on the farm she remembers so fondly, should be on Genesis Road.
In the beginning . . .
But that is the question this lush, beautifully written novel poses. Just where is the beginning? At what intersection—and Glenna and Carey come to many along the way, highways, latitude and longitude, the mountain range that divides east from west, past from future and back to past again—is one cast out of Paradise? In the first book of the Old Testament it’s the intersection between serpent and Eve, but in Glenna’s view, Eve gets a bum rap. Still, she blames her own mother for not protecting her from her father before her mother sent her to Granny Pearl’s. She mourns the lost baby she went through years of procedures to conceive, though her genetic line convinces her that she would have been a bad mother. Granny Ruby, Glenn’s mother, maintains that his sins originated with his tyrannical grandfather, Granddaddy Sims, who worked the boy harder than two men and, when the boy fell off a tractor he was too young to drive, left him with a compound fracture in a field beneath a festering sun. The man that boy becomes lies about his limp and abuses his children in the same way he was abused, but they can’t blame him, Grandma Ruby insists; the sin lies with the grandfather.
Nor, we discover, was the farm on Genesis Road, Glenna’s lost paradise, the original Garden of Eden. That lies in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the land the government took from the Dunns, Glenna’s maternal ancestors, by eminent domain. The twelve-acre farm on Genesis Road was a consolation prize, a reparation that never satisfied her great grandfather Eustis Dunn, who grieved all his life that he could not be buried beside his parents in the family plot that lies within the boundaries of the Park. It is in the ongoing intersection between travelogue and backstory, personal history, that Genesis Road explores its theme. Where does history begin? Carey is a history professor, his mother a fundamentalist who believes the world is no more than six thousand years old. As he recalls for Glenna, one of his students on a school-sponsored trip to England, announced “I don’t believe in prehistory” even as the group stood marveling at Stonehenge. After all, the notion that there was life on earth before human life, before God invented man on the sixth day of his week-long spree of creation, begets the notion that there might well be life after human life is extinguished, and that is too terrifying for a fundamentalist to entertain. Best to believe fossils a manmade trick and dinosaur bones a hoax; otherwise one might have to confront the fact that so far only alligators, roaches, and mosquitoes have escaped extinction. The novel takes place in 1999, but Underwood’s story is eerily contemporary, for it predicts the rise of the Christian right, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the advent of alternative facts and fake news.
Everywhere Glenna’s and Carey’s travels take them, the landscape is altered in some way: mountains where once there were oceans, deserts that were forests, sequoias so ancient and tall it’s unimaginable they were once saplings. What is original—if one can fathom origin—is inevitably not, rather an attempt at restoration, like the new tall grass prairie national park the two of them visit. “You can’t go home again,” Glenna admonishes Carey, who sometimes irks her with his professorial lectures and advice, though her anticipation of firsts begins to sour as their loop through the West turns eastward to lasts and a shrinking distance between her and her past, the wreckage of her third marriage, her strained relationship with her mother, the burned house, and most of all the responsibility for Genesis Road, for unknown to her, her mother never sold the land. Faye took Glenn back but never remarried him in order to preserve it, and in a desperate attempt to dissuade Glenna from the trip and keep her home, she gives her daughter the deed, an inheritance that seems unbearably weighty, for the farm Glenna pined for is grown over with weeds and woods, no longer a garden. Before she sets out with Carey, Glenna takes out a newspaper ad and puts up a for sale sign, but by the time she returns she understands that if one can’t go back to the very beginning—say, a time before Lewis and Clark began the westward migration of white civilization at the expense of the indigenous people and the integrity of the land, or before a national park displaced her forbears—one can rise from the ashes of a ruined life to begin again. It is not a return, but a renewal. As Glenna understands it: “A home can’t ever really be a home if you hold it accountable to freezing the past. A place can’t anchor time.”
Over and over she and Carey argue about wilderness. Carey has a lot to say about dams and all they’ve destroyed, but Glenna is aware that you can’t simply undam a river and return to a land untouched by the destruction the water has wrought. What wilderness they encounter in national parks is protected wilderness, there for the sake of people’s enjoyment, and that’s the rub. Cast out of the garden, again and again we attempt to recreate it. Should man go extinct, any wilderness that comes after will not be the same as that which came before. Glenna has to think the unthinkable in the larger sense in order to come to terms with her problems on a personal level.
At the Taos pueblo an Indian named Thomas sells Glenna a dreamcatcher with seven strands, his deluxe model. The simplest has four, for the four elements: earth, water, air, fire. Thomas invites Carey and Glenna to guess what the six strands of a more sophisticated model represent, but Carey, the history professor, fails to guess the correct answer: space and time. And it is Glenna who identifies the seventh in the model that she will buy: “Us . . . People. Human Beings.”
Those seven elements are the foundation for this compelling novel that explores both time and space in the lives of two fully realized and sympathetic characters, whose enduring friendship offers hope and another perspective on time. If any human life equals no more than a blink, two minutes on the clock-calendar from what we can know of the beginning until now, those two minutes are precious. The present is always in some ways longer than the past, existing as it does in suspension, the eternal moment that lies between the known past and the uncertainty of the future. It is the space in which novels exist, and only an openness to the future can foster plot, no matter how hard characters try to resist it. That openness to the future is something Glenna, who rarely crossed the Tennessee state line in her first thirty-six years, must learn by uncovering her own sins and accepting her vulnerability as she discovers the vast history and prehistory of a world larger than any she previously imagined. It is with pleasure and gratitude that the reader accompanies her.
