[In the following excerpt, Davenport offers a positive assessment of The Land That Drank the Rain.]

Being an American, over a century after Henry James’s celebrated remark, is still a complex fate. What is perhaps more noteworthy in our age of easy mobility, mass communication, and increasing national uniformity is that it is still a complex fate—and a virtually unique fate—to be a southerner. More accurately it is a paradoxical fate. The southerner exists at the intersection of two deeply rooted conflicting traditions: on the one hand stand family piety, southern Protestantism, regional loyalty, and attachment to the land; and on the other stands ornery rebelliousness. Take a modern southerner, no matter how sophisticated, and set him down in New York: he is likely to feel like a paroled convict—or perhaps a deposed monarch. Yet if this same exile is brought home to a cozy Sunday dinner with the family in Raleigh or Birmingham, he may well experience acute feelings of suffocation and entanglement. A dilemma of this sort clearly accounts for a great deal of the vitality (to say nothing of the subjects) of recent southern writing.

Everywhere in contemporary southern fiction one encounters flight, escape, rebellion—and yet the opposite tendency is always there, creating tension and demanding satisfaction. The characters are not free to choose between these two claims: they have to bring them to a synthesis or resolution of some sort. Their fate is indeed complex. …

The latest novels by John Ehle and William Hoffman are inversions of the fugitive theme: both involve people who flee toward the South instead of away from it. But of course I am treating the story of entanglement and flight here as a thematic preoccupation rather than a plot formula, and from that standpoint these fictions obviously have close affinities with a novel such as Heading West. …

The Land That Drank the Rain, William Hoffman’s eighth novel, resembles The Winter People [by John Ehle] in that it is set in a timeless primitive community—a barren coal-mining region in eastern Kentucky—and involves the flight south of a nonsoutherner. Actually the flight is eastward in this case: Claytor Carson is a sophisticated Californian who has come to this barren spot, sick unto death with self-loathing over his debauched west-coast existence, and in search of purgation or oblivion. He tries to divest himself of everything and to become wholly self-sufficient in his crude hermitage. He even gives up language, refusing to read his mail, avoiding books of instruction that might help him in his new life, and posing to the people of the mining village, Crowtown, as a mute. The reader gradually understands his previous life as fragmentary memories of it come into his mind, and realizes the depths of depravity to which he and his wife Bea had sunk. His strong sense of guilt—a guilt which makes him seem more southern than Californian—has driven him into this silent wasteland in the hope of attaining emptiness.

But even here Carson can’t escape involvement: he is visited by his former business partner, and eventually by his wife—who is as depraved as ever and who tries to bring him back to his former ways. The most remarkable intruder into his world, however, and one of the most original and moving characters in recent fiction, is a young man of the area whose name is Vestil Skank, but who calls himself Nash Shawnee. His relationship with Claytor is bizarre: it is often antagonistic, and yet they are obviously drawn to each other. Throughout most of the action Vestil conducts a wild monologue—for Claytor never replies until the end of the book—in which he makes clear his frustrated obsession with escaping from this place, just as Claytor had wanted to escape to it. He needs money—of which Claytor still has a large sum—to escape. “I could go into the mines,” he says; “I’m not scared to work coal, but I’m scared once I get in I’ll never get out. Once a man goes under that old mountain, she won’t turn him loose. Oh, God, I got to get out. Jesus, ain’t anybody listening? I got to go!” It is through Vestil, and through the heroic sacrifice that Claytor finally makes for him, that Claytor is restored to the world of human involvement.

Few contemporary writers have anything like William Hoffman’s transparency of style and narration. He comes very close to the almost unattainable ideal, once stated by Ford Madox Ford, of giving a reader “the conviction that he was listening to a simple and in no way brilliant narrator who was telling—not writing—a true story”; and this attainment is even more remarkable because the fictional universe in which Hoffman operates at his best is bizarre and unreal. The reader constantly finds himself believing the unbelievable. One of the most striking examples of this element in The Land That Drank the Rain is seen in Vestil’s attempt to get Claytor to back him financially in his projected career (one of many) as songwriter and singer. The reluctant Claytor, temporarily trapped on one bank of an isolated river, is forced to witness a strange audition: “I don’t expect you to buy me blind,” Vestil calls to him from the other side; “you get a free show.” And what a show it is! There, in the middle of the wilderness, a figure on one side of a nameless river watches a figure on the other side as he beats his red, white, and blue guitar, leaps about, howls, and sings his crazy songs:

Won’t wait no longer
In the woods near your door,
Cause I’m going into darkness
Of Hell’s hot floor,
But surely I’ll meet you
When you drop flaming from the brink,
And when you raise your mouth for water,
I’ll give you my blood to drink.

Such writing, like much of the work of Ehle and [Doris] Betts, is no more simply fantastic than it is simply realistic. It is at once familiar and strange, real and unreal, temporal and timeless. In fact, although I hesitate to use a term so glibly applied nowadays to such a variety of situations, it is mythic. The degree to which it attains to myth, and the comparatively natural and unstudied manner in which it does so, is unusual in recent fiction. And I would suggest, finally, that this distinction partly results from energies and tensions which yet survive, at least for the time being, in the tradition of southern writing.

Brad Sullivan (date 28 July 1985)

[In the following brief review, Sullivan lauds Godfires for its gripping plot and its examination of characters struggling with their own Puritanical values and inner passionate feelings.]

In Godfires, William Hoffman takes a big bite of rural Virginia, chews it up good, and spits out a bunch of seeds. It is a tale of value struggles, a tale of life.

The mysterious death of a wealthy resident of Tobaccoton, a small Virginia town, leads to an investigation that penetrates beneath the mask of Southern hospitality and propriety to a darker, private force marked with religious and sexual obsession.

Howell County authorities discover the dead body of Vin Farr, dressed in a blue summer blazer, looking serene. He is lying in the grass on the unpopulated side of a local stream, without a boat or other transportation nearby. His body is unmarked except for tiny abrasions on one toe and one finger; the autopsy yields no evidence of foul play.

Billy Payne, the heavy-drinking commonwealth's attorney of Howell County, has lost a bundle of cases in a row and sees this investigation as a chance to make points with a public that is beginning to doubt his capabilities.

It is also an opportunity to reacquaint himself with Vin's wife, Rhea Gatlin, whom he has loved secretly for years and years. She is an elegant Southern belle known for her generosity, her regular church attendance and her native beauty and grace.

As Billy investigates Vin's death, he comes across puzzling clues: a large check, signed by Vin and made out to a black militant religious order, a small silver angel found near the spot where the dead body was recovered; and a lewd tattoo, partially hidden by hair, on a private part of Vin's body.

These clues lead Billy into a labyrinth of sexual desire and religious obsession. He suspects that Vin's sexuality played a role in his death but he has great difficulty broaching the subject with Rhea, the pure, ideal woman of his romantic vision.

His efforts carry out an effective investigation in a town that turns against public figures when they're not in church on Sunday—a town that boasts of 23 churches for fewer than 3,000 people—lead to a very interesting narrative.

Hoffman, who lives in Charlotte Court House, plays these tensions for all they're worth, creating a gripping story about the unyielding Puritanical heritage that still exists in many public places and the passionate revolts against it that take place in private.

Godfires is an entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking book.