01/26/2015
Rural Mississippi is the setting for Kornegay’s beautifully written first novel, in which James “Jay” Mize invests all his family’s assets into an experiment in soil-free farming, a concept he believes will revolutionize the farming industry and save the world. He convinces his wife, Sandy, of its promise, and she enthusiastically works to make his project succeed. However, bad weather and a family tragedy handicap the endeavor, and Jay faces bankruptcy. In his dejection, he begins having paranoid fantasies, which compel Sandy to regretfully take their son, Jacob, back to town to live temporarily with her father. Jay and Sandy struggle with the breakup of their family and their difficult circumstances. When Jay finds a corpse on his land after an August rain, he believes it came to be there as part of a conspiracy to ruin him. As a result, he initiates a chain of tragic events affecting him, his family, and others. Penetrating characterizations and a well-charted story bode well for future work from this author. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)
Soil
Narrated by Brian Hutchinson
Jamie KornegayUnabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes
Soil
Narrated by Brian Hutchinson
Jamie KornegayUnabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Let us stand, brothers and sisters, to applaud the arrival of an exquisitely deranged new voice to American fiction. Dig your hands into this Soil to find gutty and peppery writing, an almost recklessly bold imagination, audacious empathy, and a story so twisty and volatile that nearly every turn feels electrifyingly unexpected. This rough-n-tumble model of Southern literature—the vehicle of choice for the late greats Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and William Gay—has felt stalled on the roadside for several years now; Jamie Kornegay just pulled up with some big-ass jumper cables.”
—Jonathan Miles, author of Want Not and Dear American Airlines
"Jamie Kornegay's novel Soil heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice. This book is atmospheric 'as all get-out,' as my grandmother might have said, and it crackles with intensity. It's everything I want a novel to be, a fine story well-told with characters I won't forget, set in a world so real you can smell it and taste it. Kornegay's something special."
–Steve Yarbrough, author of The Realm of Last Chances
"Mississippi has done it again, given us yet another brilliant writer. Welcome, Jamie Kornegay, to a long line of kick-ass storytellers. Soil is one of the most memorable novels I've read in years, with a killer story told in killer language. Highly, highly recommended."
—Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“Jamie Kornegay's prose is as rich and fertile as the Mississippi Delta landscape that spreads across the pages of Soil. It is poetic, both in its language and in the soulful complexity of its characters, all of them fallen and trudging along the hard worn path of redemption on dirty hands and knees.”
—Michael F. Smith, author of Rivers
“Marked by wry humor, unforgettable characters, and riveting suspense, Jamie Kornegay’s Soil is a spellbinding Greek tragedy played out against the backdrop of the choked river-bottoms, sprawling fields, and dusty roads of the Mississippi Delta. A brilliant, haunting portrait of the havoc one desperate man’s decisions and dreams can wreak upon himself and those around him. This remarkable novel springs from rich earth indeed, and the end result is a book that will leave readers reeling.”
—Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter, and The Southern Cross
“A darkly droll, epic novel told in a style I’d have to call a deceptively swift amble through a most vividly rendered, watery Delta world. Anyone from Coleridge to Twain to Faulkner to William Gay would have loved reading this book, and you will, too.”
—Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
"Jamie Kornegay's powerful debut novel, Soil, is just as rich, dark and primal as the title suggests and it is hard not to discuss the various characters' plights without slipping into metaphor as they both literally and figuratively dig and tunnel and turn up all that is buried. This novel is brimming with suspense while continuously locating the fine line separating good from evil. Just as the soil delivers all that is decomposed and lost, it also brings promise of future growth and in this case, it is in the form of the protagonist's son. Kornegay's rendering of hope and innocence against the backdrop of depravity and darkness is admirable and
moving." —Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life after Life
"Kornegay's skillful writing keeps the story gripping and the atmosphere haunting."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Kornegay imbues his characters with depth and his story with suspense, but the real star of the book is the pungent and foreboding Mississippi earth itself. A promising debut from an assured new voice in Southern fiction.”
—Library Journal
“Kornegay's keenly observed novel is a bit of a slow burner at first, but it soon builds into a page-turning crescendo and a suspense-filled finale which will make your heart pound and leave you opened-mouthed in horror.”
—Western Gazette
“This marvelous bookresembles the Southern Gothic novels of the past such as the classic EternalFire by Calder Willingham.”
—Smoky Mountain News
03/01/2015
A renegade farmer who goes up against nature and loses forms the basis of independent Southern bookseller Kornegay's memorable first novel. When Jay Mize gave up the comforts of a respectable career and home to begin an experiment in soil-free farming, he expected to be on the cutting edge of an agricultural revolution. But a crippling flood washes out his efforts and places him on the road to bankruptcy, and his wife, Sandy, concerned about Jay's mental health, leaves with their son. Soon after, Jay comes upon a corpse in the Tockawah River behind his house; convinced the body is part of a plot to destroy him, he sets about making it disappear. Meanwhile, a nosy deputy with a roving eye for the town's single women is poking around the Mize farm (not to mention Sandy's apartment) in search of a big bust to validate his wayward career. Add to that a revenge-seeking vagrant roaming the woods behind Jay's property and perhaps his paranoia isn't so misguided after all. VERDICT Kornegay imbues his characters with depth and his story with suspense, but the real star of the book is the pungent and foreboding Mississippi earth itself. A promising debut from an assured new voice in Southern fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]—Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
2015-01-08
In this Southern-gothic debut novel, a lost soul battles the elements and the elements win.The Earth is a malevolent character from the opening scene, in which a rural Mississippi flood causes muck to overflow from ditches. Into this ominous setting comes Jay Mize, an idealistic misfit with a paranoid streak and unworkable dreams of running a self-sustaining farm. At the start of the book, both he and his life are well on the way to unraveling. The farm has collapsed, his neighbors think he's unhinged, and his wife is starting to agree. Then a dead body mysteriously turns up on his property, and his paranoia hits a peak. Jay is convinced that he needs to destroy all evidence of the body, and his efforts inevitably open up new complications; especially since one hand remains missing. His wife, Sandy, leaves him and takes their son at around the same time Jay starts getting shadowed by policeman Danny Shoals. Jay has a shameful racial crime in his family history, and Shoals—who's soon devoting his efforts to seducing Sandy—has some bad behavior in his own past. Jay's reunion with his son provides a brief moment of hope before his final confrontation with an angry river and an angrier police officer. The main problem is the lack of any sympathetic characters; Jay is simply too far gone to rank as a tragic figure. But Kornegay's skillful writing keeps the story gripping and the atmosphere haunting.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170642953 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Soil
1
Before the flood, a stouthearted young couple was putting down roots in the nearby town of Madrid, where they’d settled after college—a man, his wife, and their young son. They painstakingly refurbished a house and planted an attractive garden in the back, where the father let the toddler dig and explore and pluck green tomatoes too soon from the vine. Smiles were never absent from their thankful faces, and if there were troubles then no one bothered to recall them. But a young man, especially one so clever, will grow restless and sometimes throw away everything when he turns elsewhere to affirm his life’s purpose.
The trouble started with compost. He first began making and experimenting with it for his job in soil management at the local Farm Service Agency. He started small, a few wooden bins in the backyard of the home on Nutt Street. He collected kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, raked leaves and grass clippings. He spread one ingredient over the next in lasagna layers, sprayed them down with the water hose, and turned the piles regularly with a garden fork. If properly maintained, the compost would actually become hot to the touch and would belch plumes of steam when stirred on cold mornings. He loved the earthy smell that rose from the mounds, the whiff of rot and fiber, the way the soil broke and fluffed a little more each day. Here was nature at work, made more efficient by man’s guiding hand.
He began to judge everything for its recyclability. All matter was either carbon or nitrogen. Soon he was collecting bags of lawn debris from neighborhood curbs and canvassing farms for straw bales and manure. He sorted leaves by species, made flowcharts of dung potency. Bins and mounds multiplied as he tinkered with ratios and tested fertility. He tilled up every square inch of backyard and planted vegetables and herbs, lined the front walk and driveway with big terra-cotta pots, each plot a test patch for some specially formulated recipe.
When he submitted a sample to a USDA-sanctioned exhibition, earning the highest marks in soil friability, nutrient retention, and water solubility, the local newspaper caught wind of it and dubbed him Compost Man. This gave his colleagues a good laugh. Even his wife joked to their friends about his growing “mudballs” out back and said she’d prefer him sneaking off with her lingerie catalogs than ogling the seed brochures the way he did.
One morning he walked out back to turn the piles and found that someone had laid a cruel turd atop one of his prize mounds. It was definitely human. The stench was complex and he found a fast-food napkin with brown streaks nearby. He couldn’t believe the audacity. They’d just hopped up on the bin, draped themselves over the corner, and let one rip.
He paced the back porch and spent hours at the window, profiling every neighbor who walked by with a pet. Every jogger, every biker, every long-haired mischievous teen. What was this compulsion to foul something so pure and constructive? Who was deranged enough to do such a thing? He walked out back with his hammer and studded the rims of each bin with nails. Next time someone came snooping pants-down in the dark, they’d pay with blood.
His colleagues thought it was a hilarious prank. Even his wife suggested gently that he was taking it too hard. “We eat out of that soil, for God’s sake!” he replied. “You want to end up in the hospital with a bacterial infection? Can you see our little son, dead from E. coli poisoning?”
She was skeptical of this, but he scoured the internet to prove the causes and insufficient cures of various bacteria and infections, moving on from there to viruses, superbugs, pandemics, extinction events. The deeper he dug, the more perils he uncovered.
Likewise the prank grew epic in his imagination. It was a pointed statement—“I shit on your life”—made by a lone creep and endorsed by a society that deemed him irrelevant. Somehow the smallest things can break a man, and the hairline fracture deep within the young scientist spread over the next several months. It did not depress him or slow his obsession but rather excited his research, leading to more compost mounds and more outlandish experiments. He upset the whole neighborhood when he planted a late-season crop of corn right there in the front yard. His wife was horrified by bean and cucumber vines planted in the rain gutters, cascading down like gaudy Christmas decorations. “You’re turning our beautiful home into a feedlot,” she accused him.
He read incessantly and became an expert on diverse farming techniques from ancient to modern civilizations. His interpretation of historical patterns convinced him that poor soil management had led to the downfall of societies throughout time. He relayed all of these findings to his farmer clients and expounded on the hazards of modern farming. They were hidebound men who planted cotton, soybeans, and corn as their families had for generations, trying to eke out modest livings against increasingly volatile world markets. Times were tough enough. They had no use for antiquarian farming theories promoted by some arrogant, pencil-pushing upshot. Nor did they appreciate his accusations that they were squandering the soil by leaching it with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, casting a blight upon the land and rivers and seas with their shortsighted and unsustainable methods, virtually ensuring that their grandchildren, along with everyone else’s, would wander the famished countryside like starving refugees in a desert of poisoned dust. All they wanted from him was help filling out subsidy applications and disaster relief forms.
The soil scientist grew bitter and withdrawn. He felt rather like a young suburban Moses, entrusted with critical information from on high that the general rabble was too distracted to glean. The agency confirmed this by requesting his resignation.
Their idyllic life threatened, his wife went back to school to get her teaching degree while he stayed home with the boy. But he did not mope and feel sorry for himself. Just before his forced retirement, the young farmer had attended a regional ag conference where he heard a lecture on advances in hydro- and aeroponic technology delivered by a famous environmental scientist who made the stunning admission “Plants don’t actually need soil to grow. Just a fissure for their roots to spread and soak up moisture and nourishment.”
It was an offhanded remark, on the way to a larger point, but to the soil scientist it felt like an atom bomb. The statement was so simple and staggering, so obvious. Soil-free farming. Why had he never seen it? Look at the bonsais and cacti in their rock gardens, the weeds growing up from cracks in the sidewalk.
His imagination vaulted years ahead to farms that operated indoors, fields stacked one atop the next in glass high-rises, each floor its own crop grown in recycled water and mineral baths. He saw farmers in white lab coats appraising the beautiful plants, no bugs or blemishes, no sweat or sunburn, not a speck of dirt in sight. The future will be spotless! Hoes and plows became droppers and beakers. Computers monitored optimal growing conditions. All of the equipment was powered by the sun and the wind, a perfect organic machine. The greatest pitfalls of agriculture—pestilence and disease, the unpredictability of weather, poisonous pollutants and industrial runoff—could be solved by making the whole process simpler, cleaner, and more efficient. He could build it and lead the innovation. He could make the world healthier and more peaceful. There was no time to waste. To proceed authentically, he would have to start from the ground up.
He searched for a piece of land, spent two months sorting through overpriced and unsuitable plots until he found a house with seventeen acres twenty miles south of town. It had been a rental property for years, but the owners had come on hard times and were looking to unload it quickly. The house was a charmless pile of bricks compared to their town cottage, and the backyard was full of castaway equipment and scrap. The fields were grown over, all scrub and marsh and raw potential. Beyond the house was pastureland and forest, even a river, the wild and portentous Tockawah River, which ran along the southwestern edge of the property and would serve as a constant source of irrigation. It was the perfect site for his experiment. All of it could be his for a song.
He composed his pitch and approached his wife. She listened to him describe the experiments and the laboratory and the farm tower he would erect, how he intended to produce enough fresh food to supply the local population—“Not a farm so much as a growing system, indifferent to the whims of markets and nature.” The way he described it and the completeness of his vision revealed a surprising logic born from his craze, and she became seduced a little.
She wondered about the home they’d made, the comforts they’d earned. Couldn’t they live in town and start a farming business on the side?
The start-up capital to make this dream a reality required both the proceeds from the Nutt Street house and the inheritance she’d recently received from her stepmother, an unexpected gift which might have been wisely spent paying off student loans or starting a college fund for the boy.
“What better way to prepare a boy than to raise him in the country?” he asked. Teach a boy to hunt, fish, and farm, and you’ve paved the way for an honest, salt-of-the-earth man to live free come hell or high water.
She got a far-off look in her eye. Could she see it all before her, just as he had? Or was she scared to say no, knowing that if she kept her husband and his ambition shackled here she risked losing the very things she loved?
She had faith in him and his passion. He was asking her to double down on their young fortune. They took the leap together and spent some of the best days of their marriage in this shared endeavor.
A year later they were ruined.
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