ANCIENT OCEANS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY, a very accomplished first novel

ANCIENT OCEANS OF KENTUCKY
DAVID CONNERLEY NAHM
Two Dollar Radio
$14.00 ebook/paperback bundle at the link above!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray county roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.

Leah's little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Deeply surprised that this is a first novel.

Summer comes to Kentucky as a shock, as though it was impossible for the land to ever be green and full again. Magnolias with swollen white petals sway in warm breezes, record-high humid air fills lungs like warm water and the invisible mechanism that animates everything slows as summer's heavy thumb rests on its ancient belts.

It's true that Author Nahm isn't a tyro, having been published in many prestigious venues (eg, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet) prior to this novel appearing from the midwestern fastness harboring Two Dollar Radio (to whom I offer my thanks for sending me this book), a genuinely exciting press, in 2014.

I'm not sure that the plot will make any difference to you in deciding whether or not to read it. The point of the journey through a smallish Anytown, its civic and familial rituals and failures, is all in the way Author Nahm speaks to us.

The morning was warm. Each drop of light suspended in the air. Against the bricks, the ceiling was a universe of sun-bleached geometric forms and figures waiting for young imaginations to see them.
–and–
Crow Station, Kentucky: a girl at the window watching a shift in the shadows, listening to the sound of the night, the glittering dark above her bed, her father's hands having placed the sky there, cracked plaster rivers among constellations of dead boys and girls, but by morning the vault of the heavens is nothing but white ceiling, though the corners do flutter with dusty webs her parents have not noticed and her brother's bed.
–and–
The television makes only one sound, the soft hum of light.

The focus Author Nahm brings to the light, the surfaces, the ways in and out of every space and every thought of the characters is, for me, the appeal of the book. I love to see the spaces a story takes place within. I am always happy to see evocative, even emotive, language used in conveying a sense of the look, the visual impact, of a space, a person, a point of view. This book is replete with these moments and observations that he has imbued with the emotional resonance to enrich his characters' actions and reactions.

It isn't often that the physical object "book" merits discussion in my review. This object, with its deckled-edge pages that are evocative of an older time when books were delivered without bindings and with uncut signatures direct from the printer, is perfectly in tune with my sense of its story. The novel inside the book benefits from this expensive grace note. The cover, with its french flaps and its matte, uncoated stock, reinforces the days-of-yore feeling that a paperback usually struggles to convey. The beautiful halftone reproductions of ancient fossils from an 1889 monograph on the geology of Kentucky are the lift the book needed to take it into next-level aesthetic harmony between its physical and metaphysical selves.

I saw a Goodreader's addition of the book to his TBR and, oddly enough, that came after my suggestion of this novel to my Young Gentleman Caller in our Sunday-morning Zoom. (He had forgotten about the time change so it was a bit earlier than I was expecting *grumble* so he was vamping until I could open my eyes all the way by asking me what he should read next...my eye lit on this spine in my bookcrate...and we were away.) It's another one of what he amusingly, if accurately, calls my "hardware jobs"...books I've BookDarted so thoroughly that they clank. He's going to be out here soon so I'll hand it over then, but y'all need to get you one! There's a paperback-ebook bundle for only $14! Cheap at twice the price. Honest!