Lady Chevy by John Woods

Let’s get it out of the way right away. High school senior Amy Wirkner is fat. Morbidly obese. 270+ pounds. So broad-beamed is Amy, that those who belittle her call her Lady Chevy both behind her back and to her face. Has become an Honor student. In spite of the harassment. Wants to become a veterinarian. Few friends. She lives in a trailer with her limp noodle dad who does a little roof work and hides behind a bottle. Mom is also fat, but has not always been so. Not like Amy. Stonewall is Amy’s toddler brother, beset with a seizure disorder that may be genetic or may be from poisoned groundwater. 

You see, their hometown, Barnesville, OH is the latest dreg town to be wooed by the promise of riches after fracking muscles in. In her own attempt to deny her lot in life, Amy’s mom prowls the bars and openly flaunts her infidelity. 

Amy does have a lifelong friend, Paul McDonald, who Amy may or may not love. They tried at about 14 or 15yo, but a romantic connection didn’t fit. Coal mining is slowly taking Paul’s dad from him. Amy’s grandfather’s reputation is that he was once the local Grand Dragon of the Klan and is not ashamed of the cruelty he oversaw. And Amy’s Uncle Thomas, a damaged Afghanistan vet, fancies himself as Goebbels in a bunker.

The sheriff’s office is a microcosm of legal white power. The sheriff holds sway over Barnesville, but it’s Deputy Brett Hastings who Woods uses to speak for law-and-order residents on the high side of the tracks. Hastings is the child of academics who went to one of the most liberal of liberal arts colleges, Oberlin. Started out in a career-oriented major only to switch to philosophy. Worse, after a failed attempt at grad school, he defied his parents and enrolled in the police academy. Sees himself as sort of the keeper of the soul of the sheriff’s department. Where he routinely lectures his partners on all sorts of philosophical theories that support his beliefs on the duality of man, of which he is the primary perpetrator of find the bad guys and then dispatch of them according to his own stilted belief system.

Paul McDonald has had it with the frackers. They poison the air, the water, the people. The pitiful monthly payments for land access and mineral rights are a joke. With some help from a book on violent protest, he prepares a pipe bomb to sabotage a fracking pump and asks Amy to drive him. She balks, but gives in to her lifelong friend. The bombing goes well, but there was a guard on duty.

And from here, things go downhill. Dramatically. Quickly. Not only are the police looking at more than a case of ecoterrorism, Amy has to think about how their actions will impact her family, her future, her chance of a scholarship to Ohio State. We all know that universities abhor admitting felons much less giving them money.And just how low will she go to stay on the course she has planned for herself and much of the town expects for her.

This book is tough. If we look past the superficial story, a number of background themes emerge. The desperation of the forgotten. Could be an ecological thriller about the disasters of fracking. Perhaps it’s a statement about the rise from the ashes of being bullied as a child to being one who falls into becoming a felon who commits atrocities. Maybe it’s about the dissolution of a family trying to survive. Or a comment on white privilege? Could consider it to be about the emotional growth of the fat girl from living a shamed life as an emotionally beaten child to become an honor student and college applicant destined to turn her back on her youth and a land she despises. Or is it simply secrets and lies across the generations from both side of the tracks. Guess that means that Appalachian Noir has something for everyone.

What John Woods has done is present an eloquently written statement on the futility of those left behind in America. He focuses on his home, rural east-central Ohio, where strip mining once was king, but has given way to the promises of fracking. Lady Chevy focuses on familiar ground for Woods who grew up in the decaying region just west of Wheeling. What some might challenge or praise is that Woods, a white male MFA graduate, has made his protagonist a fat, disenfranchised female from nowhere, USA. Woods’ narrative gifts show no hesitation for him making such a significant jump from his personal comfort zone. What’s even more impressive is that this is his first novel (after having published a number of short stories).  

Go into this book forewarned. This is a dark and depressing story told with such authenticity that setting is aside can be problematic. After reading this review, you may decide to find and read this book. You may then curse me for bringing it to your attention. But you won’t forget this descent into a life that must not be ignored. For that, you just might thank me because you probably wouldn’t have given these people a single thought. Remember the name of John Woods. I suspect a new and important voice is in our midst.

East Coast Don