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59 pages 1 hour read

Jeff Zentner

In the Wild Light

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

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Background

Cultural Context: Substance Abuse Disorder & Appalachia

Substance use and addiction are traditionally associated with urban areas. The novel confronts a difficult reality that the Centers for Disease Control has termed a plague of significant dimensions. Substance use disorder disproportionately affects the Appalachia region more than other regions of the country. Deaths directly related to opioid use are more than 70% higher in rural Appalachia (“Mental Health Facts for Appalachian People.” American Psychiatric Association, 2018). In the Wild Light touches on some of the reasons that might explain the opioid crisis in Appalachia, particularly among those born after 2000. The area’s principal economic industries—farming and mining—face apocalyptic downturns leaving the region’s long-time residents struggling to make ends meet. And those industries, where they are still in operation, pose the risk of catastrophic long-term injuries for which prescription medications become part of rehab programs and, in turn, trigger dependency.

The insular nature of Appalachian culture brings about suspicion toward government agencies and outreach programs designed to address substance use and provide specialized counseling. Doctors, public health service representatives, and therapists alike are dismissed as interfering outsiders. Given the limited economic opportunities and impoverished home lives, Appalachia’s Gen Z, bored and depressed, turn to substance use as an escape—and, for some, like Jason Cloud, as a reliable income stream. The culture’s long tradition of stoic endurance, of families keeping to themselves, elevates substance use as a strategy for coping with life’s difficulties and provides yet another reason not to acknowledge it, much less treat it.

At one point in the novel, Cash wryly acknowledges how much he owes to Sawyer’s dark culture of drug use, for without attending meetings at Narateen—the government-funded agency designed to help adolescents whose families have been impacted by the Appalachian region opioid crisis—he never would have met Delaney. Both kids cared for mothers with addiction. When Cash first meets Delaney, whose “haphazard” dress and spotty attendance record in school made no secret of her mother’s addiction, he notices that she had the “old-beyond-her-years way of someone who’s had to parent a parent” (20). Cash begins to attend meetings after discovering his mother dead—from a fentanyl overdose—in the bathroom of their trailer. In an inspirational and uplifting novel devoid of excessive antagonists, one notable exception is Jason Cloud, the town’s “dealer of weed, meth, heroin, fentanyl, Oxycontin, Lortabs, Valium, gabapentin, and whatever else people buy to wake themselves up or put themselves to sleep” (11).

Social and Literary Context

When Cash arrives in Connecticut as a stranger in a strange land, he must confront an array of emotional adjustments, the most significant of which is his slow-motion epiphany over what it means to be from Tennessee. In author Jeff Zentner’s copious interviews in connection with the novel’s publication, he makes it a point to stress how proud he is of his Tennessee heritage and its complex cultural identification. Cash’s journey reflects this sentiment as his sense of pride in his heritage grows; although the character is initially embarrassed to admit his Appalachian origins, he eventually comes to embrace his cultural identity. When Dr. Atkins, herself from Nashville, finds out that Cash is from Tennessee, she uses the region’s rich literary culture to encourage Cash to explore poetry. “Appalachian people are storytellers,” she tells him. “We’re lovers of words. Poetry tells stories through words” (196).

In this way, In the Wild Light is a text representative of Appalachian literature, a genre that traces its roots back to the explosion of interest in regional cultures, or local-color realism, in the late 19th century. During this time, readers who could only access these locales via newspapers and magazines defined Appalachian stories as “hillbilly epics.” These were narratives of stoic and enduring families, usually farmers who were minimally educated, fiercely devoted to Protestant Christianity, and loyal to the land itself. Often rendered in pitch-perfect dialect, these stories characterized Appalachian culture as exuding a feeling of insular isolation and cozy, even charming ignorance.

Toward the end of the millennium, a number of historical fictions emerged (most notably, the survival tale Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and the experimental narrative The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver), and these and other similar texts by a new generation of university-educated writers redefined the reach and purpose of Appalachian literature. In addition to Zentner himself, significant contributors include Silas House (A Parchment of Leaves, Clay's Quilt), James Still (River of Earth), Lee Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies), and Ron Rash (One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River) and these novelists, poets, and dramatists have expanded the impact of Appalachian literature in their willingness to examine the complex issues that face the region today.

These novels use Appalachian settings and people to explore critical issues: the careless abuse of the land; environmental concerns over the exhaustion of the region’s once-abundant resources; the rise in drug use and alcoholism, particularly among teenagers and the unemployed; the persistent spiral of economic downturns and the widespread loss of economic opportunity; the corruption of local politicians and the justice system; the lack of cutting-edge educational facilities and qualified teachers; the reality of racism and anti-gay bias as the region struggles to accept cultural diversity; the region’s resistance to the possibilities of technology; and the uncertain role of religion in a contemporary, science-driven culture. Because of the plethora of issues that have impacted America since the end of the Cold War, Appalachian literature has become something of a bellwether genre to examine America’s own cultural evolution.

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