You Just Need to Talk to Somebody: A Review of Scott McClanahan's Hill William

Some people might be a little startled to pick up a book and find a first sentence that reads: “I used to hit myself in the face.” However, Hill William wasn’t my first experience with Scott McClanahan. Familiar with at least the gritty and quietly intense Crapalachiaand Stories V! out of the McClanahan canon, I was somewhat prepared. Of course, that’s still a hell of a hook line. No one can ignore that.

In brief, Hill William presents a main character who is pretty messed up:

I couldn’t get rid of the sick feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t get rid of the tightness in my shoulders like my head was going to pop off. And then it started playing in my head — the bad memories, the old bad memories. I made a fist. I took my fist and punched myself right in front of her. She shrieked and followed me into the bathroom.

She cried and said, “You need help baby. You just need to talk to somebody. You’re kind of fucked up.”

She said kind of to soften the blow. But I kept doing it—pop, pop. I fell to the floor. She screamed. I did it with the left hand. She screamed. I did it with the right hand. She screamed. Stop it. Stop it.

After McClanahan has his screwed up character solidly in our hands, the reader completely on board, the book descends into the character’s past. We proceed headlong into “the old bad memories.” What kind of experiences makes a person unable to help from mutilating themselves? What exactly happened that plays back like that in his head? Don’t worry, McClanahan quickly provides.

I just wanted to be cool. Derrick was a lot older than I was (like fifteen), and I thought he was the coolest. I was nine. He was always shooting guns, or sighting in his bow, or chewing tobacco, or talking about how he was going to kick some guy’s ass. I was six years younger and I always followed him around. One day he asked me to come and play Atari Pitfall with him. It wasn’t fifteen minutes into being there that he disappeared into his mom and dad’s bedroom. It seemed like he was gone for a long time, but I just kept playing and didn’t really think anything about it until I got killed or something.

I heard Derrick saying, “Hey. Come back here. I want to show you something.”

The prose is quiet. McClanahan just lays it out there. For a character who spends a great deal of time in worry and fear, there isn’t anything in the words to discernibly manipulate what the reader is going to feel from a given scene. There is a kind of bare poetry to the way the words are arranged, but it just is what it is. The writing comes across with such a this is what happened kind of tone that you almost start to feel before you quite realize what you just read. Frankly, it is so straightforward that you don’t see it coming. Then it hits you.

There is some real power in this book. It moves, and it moves mountains. It’s all the more impressive because McClanahan makes the movement seem effortless. If you can see the man behind the curtain as you read then you have better eyesight than I do. I just sat back and appreciated.

Though the subject matter certainly isn’t pleasant, my reading experience actually was. I enjoyed Hill William. McClanahan vividly brings “the old bad memories” forth, but the reader won’t be traumatized by them and start hitting themselves in the face. To the contrary, I think Hill William is a book people will be glad to read. I sure was.

A Portrait of Contemporary Rural Dysfunction: Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

As a product of the blah-inducing New England suburban sprawl, I remember being fascinated by Appalachia. That rugged, heavily forested mountain corridor that isn’t out West but is still mysterious territory to a child of I-95’s coastal homogeneity, its intrigue made large by middle school textbooks describing the fortitude of the legendary settlers of the country’s first real frontier and later sensational reports of all-out clan warfare and moonshiner vigilantes. The trees seemed like they’d be bigger, and so did the people. Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia is nothing and everything like those stories. His memoir of growing up in backwoods West Virginia – a broken cultural microcosm wrapped in a tourist-friendly haze, languishing amidst the specters of mining casualties and even older ghosts – is more an unflinching, heartbreaking, and laugh-inducing portrait of contemporary rural dysfunction than a compendium of tall tales, though there are plenty of those as well.

A prolific short story writer, McClanahan imbues his mosaic of brief yet enduring memory bursts with same easy, gritty exuberance that makes his fiction so distinctly habit-forming. From the outset, he grabs the reader, initiating him into the captivating Southern Gothic grotesqueries of his adolescence. There’s Grandma Ruby, the deeply flawed but endearing matriarch whose hobbies include extreme manipulation and taking photographs of corpses, and who cares for 52-year-old Uncle Nathan, a sufferer of cerebral palsy who’s also a big fan of six packs and Walker, Texas Ranger sans the irony. The dozen other aunts and uncles, distinguished by the Y sounds at the end of their names (Stanley, Elgie, Terry) and a proclivity for verbal brevity (“sheeeeeeeeeeeeet”). And the embarrassingly neurotic Little Bill whose hardcore OCD will make you never want to listen to Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” again. McClanahan shows a deep regard for not only the people of his home state but also the facets of its unique history, embellishing his painfully funny, jarring prose with bits of local and family lore, coal miner death tolls, fried chicken recipes, and the repeated exclamations (“What the fuck?”) of a perverse country preacher striving for a taste of the supernatural but only allowed to choke down the harshness of the world’s absurdity: “I knew that the dying were selfish, and the living were too.”

Subtitled, “A Biography of a Place,” Crapalachia is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining delving into the inextricable linkage of a writer and where he’s from, but it’s also a gut-stabbing meditation on the universality and pointlessness of suffering. Casual teenage viciousness, ambivalent and at times borderline criminal parenting, drug use, and especially death – what McClanahan cheekily anoints as “THE THEME OF THIS BOOK AND ALL BOOKS” – are motifs as prevalent as the 40 ounces the author and his friends slug to relieve constant boredom and a sinister, gnawing suspicion:

I awoke and saw that life was one big practical joke full of pain. Someone was laughing at us. Someone was torturing us. I remember being at Grandma Ruby’s as a little boy and crushing the ants on her sidewalk.

But there’s also hope, a fiercely ingrained hope for better days ahead and a deep-rooted cultural satisfaction in making the best of a tough situation, a sense of resilience McClanahan admires in his coal miner forebears and ostensibly in himself. It is evident in his poignant attempts to prolong the legacy and memory of his dead grandmother and uncle by depositing bags of Appalachian dirt throughout the country, in the tenderness he shows an illiterate child while substitute teaching. It is also a feeling he desperately wants to share with the reader, whom he addresses at the end of most of the short chapters, a call and response technique usually employed, interestingly enough, by the religious zealots he often ridicules. This loud plea for inclusivity, for me, is ultimately what sets Crapalachia apart and above other recent works of autobiography. In order to find meaning in the past and to solidify his identity, McClanahan wants, no needs the reader to acknowledge the harsh realities of his own decaying life. Only through understanding and acknowledging a shared condition can we create the solidarity necessary for survival: “We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.”

Daunting, but undeniably powerful. This punchy, inimitable book is one of the best memoirs I can remember reading, a prescient and preposterous ode to Americana’s charms and failures with enough greasiness to stick to your bones like homemade gravy for as long as you let it.