A review by briandice
Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories by Ron Rash

5.0

One of the reasons short fiction is my favorite genre is the requisite economy of words an author must employ. A virtuoso can make you feel all of the unsaid things; fleeting djinns seen with peripheral vision that may/not be there. My solid measuring stick of fantastic writing is reaching the end of a story and getting that unsettled just what the fuck is going on here feeling - a sensation that can come from something genre-stretching from Ben Marcus as much as a writer penning a piece in a classical style. Ron Rash is one of the latter and one of the most talented writers in the genre today.

Rash's southern roots show in all of the pieces in this collection - and that's a good thing. Those djinns aren't hidden from him - he can write a heartbreaking piece set in the shadow of the Civil War as well as a modern day love story centered around meth. He could teach a doctorate course on how to write dialogue. And then there are those passages that catch the reader unaware. The eyes mist, the throat lumps:

Maybe it's because the picture's a little blurry, but one second I see something in Kerrie's face that reminds me of when she was a baby, then something else reminds me of her in first grade and after that high school. It's like the slightest flicker or shift makes ones show more than the other. But that's not it, I realize. All those different faces are inside me, not on the screen, and I can't help thinking that if I remember every one, enough of Kerrie's alive inside me to keep safe the part that isn't.

That's from the story "Twenty-Six Days" in this collection; a mother's thoughts after a Skype video chat with a daughter deployed in Iraq. Any reader that comes across this paragraph that has ever held these fragmented images of a child far away, rarely seen, can understand exactly what Rash is talking about (regardless of the situation surrounding that part of us that is growing older). This is what we talk about when we talk about love.

Rash is about to become so very much more famous when the movie Serena is released later this year, and he deserves all of the attention he will get from penning a great novel that became that movie. But it is the short stories that have me in his orbit. I entreat you to sample his work. You won't be disappointed.