Soil (32 page)

Simon & Schuster

Reading Group Guide

Soil

Jamie Kornegay

When Jay Mize moves his family from their comfortable small-town life to a beat-up farm in the Mississippi flood basin, he's not just looking to get away from it all; he's looking to change the world. But when nature interferes with Jay's plans to revolutionize farming, and his paranoia about modern life starts to get the best of him, things unravel. Separated from his wife and son, left alone to stew in fear and anxiety on a flooded, ruined farm, Jay is convinced he's hit rock bottom. And then he finds the corpse. In a better state of mind he might have reported the body, but with his paranoia mounting and the local hot-rod deputy poking around his property, Jay convinces himself to dispose of it on the farm. With the pressure mounting, Jay is caught in his own personal apocalypse—his only remaining hope lying with attempts by his estranged family and his hippie neighbor to reel him back in from the brink.

Topics for Discussion

1. 
Soil
opens with a description of a weather pattern alternating between drought and flood. How do these contrasts influence the course of the story and its characters?

2. Early in the novel, the narrator offers an interpretation of Jay's future actions: “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.” What do you make of this sentiment—what do you think the author means?

3. “Somehow the smallest things can break a man,” the narrator muses. How do the smallest actions sometimes take on outsize proportion in our own lives? Why do little things come to serve as symbols or as catalysts for action?

4. Throughout the novel the author plays with the timeline of events—the book opens with a description of something we see much later from a totally different angle. What effect does it give to the experience of reading the book?

5. The tone of the writing also contributes much to the narrative and storytelling. Discuss how the style and tone change according to the character or action being described. How does the author bring out humor, drama, and horror?

6. Throughout the novel, a central theme is the influence of family history on individuals. It is most strikingly illustrated in the Mize men, from Jay's grandfather to his son, Jacob. How do history and heredity influence the actions of characters, and their thinking? What do you think is the author's point of view on heredity?

7. Aside from the Mize family, the character we learn the most about is Deputy Shoals. How does your perspective on Shoals evolve throughout the story? How is his character revealed and made increasingly complex? How does he serve as a foil and antagonist for Jay?

8. Aside from Shoals and the Mize family,
Soil
is populated by a plethora of minor characters, Whom did you find most surprising? Whom did you most enjoy reading about?

9. Discuss the scene in which Jay sights two mating deer and subsequently envelops himself ecstatically in the nearby mud. Is this episode a turning point for him?

10. Sandy sees Jay's paranoia and its consequences as a self-fulfilling tragedy: “I think that you believe your life will only have purpose if the world is falling down around you.” Do you agree with her perception of Jay? Do you think there are people in the world for whom this characterization is true?

11. Even for all of its darkness,
Soil
is frequently very funny. What effect did humor have on your reading experience?

12. Like Jay, Sandy endures her own, minor disintegration. She asks herself, “Who are you going to be? Who will you be, alone in the dark?” What does she mean?

13. Throughout the novel Jay maintains that it's the world—not Jay himself—that's insane. What do you make of his condemnation of modern life? Do you sympathize wth it, even a little?

14. One of the central themes of the novel is the conflict between nature as a reserve from the pressure of contemporary life and, at the same time, nature's indifference to human need. How would you characterize the author's view of nature? Is it anything like your own?

15. Images of soil, dirt, earth, and mud permeate the novel. How does the author explore the various meanings of soil?

16. Discuss the ending of the novel. How do you interpret Jay's death, his final thoughts, and the images the author uses in the last few paragraphs? Did it affect your view of the story as a whole?

Enhance your Book Club

1. The history of the Mize family, and to some extent of the Shoals family, forms a crucial part of
Soil
. Reflect on some aspect of your own family history—your parents' or grandparents' lives, or even further back. Has it influenced you?

2. 
Soil
explores Mississippi hill country in depth—with all its quirks, weirdness, dark places and bright spots. If you were to set a novel in your own town or in another place that you know well, what would you want to bring out of it? What kinds of characters would live there? How would the land and climate influence people's lives?

3. From John Grisham to William Faulkner, Mississippi is the source and inspiration of a wide body of fiction, film and TV. What do you think makes this region such a rich source for fiction?

A Conversation with Jamie Kornegay

This is your first published novel, after years of working as a bookseller. Were you always a writer, or did you come to it gradually? How long have you been working on
Soil
?

I think I've been a writer since I could read. I wrote my first novel around the age of eight, by longhand, in an
E.T.
spiral-bound notebook, and mailed it to the publisher of my favorite Judy Blume books. Sadly, it was sent back with a form rejection letter. Many years and a few failed novels later, I began
Soil
. I came up with the concept and then developed it my mind for years while I started my business, Turnrow Books. When I sat down to write it, it took about three years or so, but the book has been in my head for ten or more.

Where did this story come from? One can only hope it isn't drawn too much from real life—but were there elements from your own history, or from stories you had heard?

Taking the back roads to work one day, I drove by flooded farmland and noticed a rotten stump sticking up from the mud. My imagination got the better of me, and for a moment I thought it was a corpse. I began to imagine things through a Dostoyevskian lens. Soon I had conceived a story in which the protagonist would find a dead body and cover it up, through some twisted, misapplied guilt, which led to more questions and justifications and scenarios, all things used to build characters and stories from scratch. This led me to the gestation years I mentioned, in which I procrastinated by conducting a lot of research, including studies of planting and agriculture, and trying to develop a method by which Jay could dispose of a dead body—a method that hadn't already been done a hundred times in movies and novels—in a way that would erase all the evidence and wouldn't draw the attention of those who might or might not be watching. The chapter where Jay is wandering around the pasture thinking about this, coming up with various scenarios and contingencies, is a condensed form of the conversation I had with myself and with other thoughtful conspiracists, including my father-in-law, a private detective. I arrived at the solution pretty much the same way Jay did: imagining charcoal as a way to filter the inevitable smell of a burning body. I discovered how charcoal was made in the past and how it was used as fertilizer. It fit perfectly into the novel's theme. I consulted a New England biochar company and figured out how to design the barrel retort, sought the help of a local metal worker to build it, and secured a deer carcass from a local processor for my “organic material.” I conducted the experiment in my backyard in town, the model for the Nutt Street house, just as Jay does it with the bones in one batch and the organs on the propane burner. I had everything ready, and then it rained for three days straight, so by the time I got to the bones, they were rank and disgusting. It was a hideous project. All the revulsion and anxiety and insanity that Jay feels come from genuine emotions and experience.

The culture of Mississippi is its own character in the book—one that is treated acerbically, but not unsympathetically. Did you feel as though there were prejudices or stereotypes about the South you were engaging with, or trying to alter?

If I was toying with stereotypes, it was because I was trying to present things as I see them here—which may clash with some readers' expectations and which will hopefully create a nice, screechy feedback. Some of the prejudices about the South are well-earned, but what I find most interesting is the bedrock on which all those assumptions and prejudices are laid. It's not as simple as you see on television and in movies. In some ways, the novel is about how our misperceptions can cause unnecessary and irrevocable damage. I actually saw this more as a story about rural America in contrast to the urban world. Mississippi sets the tone and obviously inspired me, but you can place these characters in any rural community in America and find people dealing with the same issues—interactions with the land and wildlife, issues of privacy and territory, anonymity and community, age-old family disputes and prejudices. I'm very interested also in how the old ways, more preserved in the rural setting, where life turns at a slower pace, interact with the new ways.

The treatment of Jay's paranoiac mania is one of the most fascinating elements in the novel—how did you get so deeply into that kind of mental space?

Well, clearly I've already outed myself as somewhat obsessive. You take an experimental garden in the backyard, heaps of compost, a deer carcass, and an oil drum crematorium, and extrapolate from there. But I think this is what writers and artists do. They take their interests, obsessions, and fears and reel them out like taffy. I'm not normally so paranoid, but it only takes delving into the threats of the world to make you push them toward the edge. I pushed them, went to a place well past comfort, and hopefully mined some believable paranoia and madness. I actually scaled a lot of it back in the editing process. It got fairly grim there for a while, and I think that's when the deputy Danny Shoals came on the scene to balance things out.

The struggle between indifferent nature and a frightening or threatening modern world is one of the central conflicts in
Soil
, one that you exploit wonderfully without picking a side. How do you strike a balance in your own life? Do you ever feel yourself longing to pull a Jay and go back to the land? Or do you see that as a naïve fantasy?

I certainly feel that compulsion to go back to the land. I grew up in the country and spent a lot of time as a child playing in the woods. I live in town now, but when I get the chance, I still enjoy retreating into deep nature. It's a tranquil, holy place but not without its difficulties. The conflicts you find in nature seem more honest to me than those you find in town with people. So yes, I daydream about moving off the grid, setting up a self-sufficient system, and living with my family. The only thing naïve about committing to that lifestyle, at least for me, would be to think that one could easily leave all the trappings of civilization behind. And definitely, as Jay learns, you can't shut out other people. Escaping to the wilderness would simply be a means to greater privacy, easier access to nature, possibly even a solution of thrift. But in the end, we're herd animals and need to interact with other humans to feel complete.

Soil
is a unique blend of intense and graphic violence, dark humor, and thoughtful, almost elegiac prose—what kinds of scenes or bits were the most difficult to write? Which were the easiest? Is comedy or drama more interesting for you to write?

Without a doubt, the hardest scene to write was Jay dismantling the dead man. As the book exists, the reader is not invited into the tent with Jay, but in earlier drafts, we got right up beside him. I wanted to create revulsion in the reader so that perhaps they would understand what kicks Jay's madness into overdrive. It was too much. I'm thankful to early readers who advised that less is more in that instance. As I said, when things got too grim with Jay, I always enjoyed turning to Shoals for comic relief. Not that he was easy. His instincts are base and I had to plumb to hit bottom, but I enjoyed watching him swagger around the story. I think my favorite chapter to write was the one where he turns up at Sandy's house after she calls him to investigate a prowler in her basement. Based on a true story.

Some of the most moving and natural passages in the book come in the interactions between Jay and Jacob—indeed, one of
Soil
's central themes is the father-son relationship. What do you see as the difficulties and rewards of this bond? What did you learn about these relationships while working on the book?