Ben Metcalf

The adult narrator of Against the Country examines his involuntary country childhood in meta-detail. Although nothing much happens in the story, everything happens. Uprooted from “town” life in southern Illinois as a boy, he decries being thereafter raised in the “Virginia shitscape” of Goochland, “county of blood and pus,” and “the fungal toenail of Lucifer,” where tobacco “had relieved the soil of what simple nutrients it once possessed.”

An overbearing and at times show more cruel father, school troubles, family discord, a crumbling homestead and many animals – dogs, chickens, cats, rats, and snakes – are all described.

Ben Metcalf has said it took ten years to finish this book – and it shows. The language is alive, musical, densely packed – Joycean -and commands full attention. I can only assume he had a thesaurus, or several, at hand throughout the process.

The story, possibly roughly autobiographical, is an exploration of a young life, and throughout asks the question: “To what truths are we ultimately beholden?” show less

Like some of the previous reviewers, I too gave up on this book partially though. There's humor here, and there's a story that I would enjoy reading -- say, if the book was outlined and then passed on to a different author to write it. Which is not to say that Ben Metcalf can't write, but his writing is not to my taste. It feels very self-aware, challenging for the sake of being challenging, verbose for the sake of being verbose - like an intellectual exercise for the author. And that's fine show more for him, and I'm sure it's fine for some readers. But it just left me frustrated and bored. I note some reviewers didn't like the plot (or rather, the fact that there's not a whole lot of plot), or the negativity (the narrator hates pretty much everything) - but those are not deal-breakers for me. The writing style was the deal-breaker for me. My advice to a potential reader would be to sample the first few pages in a bookstore or with the "Look Inside" on Amazon, and if the writing doesn't turn you off too much, then pick it up and give it a try. show less

Against the Country starts off as a brilliant, apparently semi-autobiographical, rant of a middle aged man as he bitterly, VERY bitterly, recounts the emptiness of American country life (this country being a stereotypic land of hillbillies, hicks, rednecks, and other shallow-minded self-righteous and mostly racist "protestants" in central Virginia) in the 1970s/1980s after his father decides to leave behind the "town life" of southern Illinois and move the entire family to the country and show more closer to where he hopes god is.
As such, Ben Metcalf's novel is a hilarious verbal assault, frequently recalling Alexander Theroux's diatribe against New Hampshire in "Adultery" or Henry Miller's passionate rant against interwar New York (American) culture in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare" and akin to Michel Houellebecq's depressive realism.
Metcalf expresses nothing but acrid memories of everyone and everything (other than dogs and chickens) in his novel and the rant begins to tire before ending (plus it will likely offend anyone actually enamored or even sympathetic to rural life anywhere and likely result in countless negative reviews). Some of the metafictional technique used near the latter parts of the book gave it a somewhat disjointed vibe. Regardless, I found this to be an intelligent, insightful and engaging book well worth reading. show less

The first-person narrator of Ben Metcalf’s Against the County is ticked off, and he wants to make sure that you, the reader, understands just exactly how ticked off he is. He hates living in the country, certainly never wanted to spend his childhood there, and blames Goochland County, Virginia, for pretty much every bad thing that has ever happened in his life.

Metcalf, in fact, effectively sets the tone of Against the Country with the book’s very first sentence (a sentence that is show more typical of the style and structure used throughout the book):

“I was worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to a climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, and braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside, all because my parents did not trust that I would mature to their specifications in town.”

And, yes, our narrator is not just ticked off at Goochland County; this is a man who still hates his parents for having moved him to such a remote, poverty stricken area in the first place. But all of us, if we survive the process, eventually will come of age, and in the long run, that is what happens to our unhappy narrator. Now he wants to share with us all the details of that horrible experience. And Ben Metcalf obliges him in this sometimes sad, often laugh-out-loud funny, coming-of-age novel that would have been more have descriptively titled “Rant against the Country.”

Along the way, the narrator is (from his point-of-view) abused at home by a father who seems to take great glee and pride in making life at home as difficult as possible for his children; physically abused on the school bus on a regular basis; and abused, perhaps worst of all, by the physical environment in which he is forced to contend with snakes, forced labor, rats, and the harshest winters he would ever experience in his lifetime (both indoors and outdoors). But, through it all, never does our narrator lose either his way with words or his sarcastic sense-of-humor. He rants; he raves; and he makes us laugh.

This, for instance, is one of his typical observations about his childhood:

Mostly I spent my energies on my parents new conception of themselves, and to a smaller extent their children, as real Americans, which was undertaking enough, and looked to my chores, and mostly completed them, and did my best to stay out of the on-deck circle for a whipping, where I never stood less than third in line.”

That image of a special “on-deck circle” for whippings paints a vivid picture – and it made me laugh, transforming the sentence into one of my favorites in the entire book:
Against the Country is not an easy read, but patient readers will soon find themselves warming to both the narrator and his voice. it is a novel I will remember for a long time, one that has earned a permanent spot on my already overcrowded book shelves.

Bonus Suggestion: Do not skip the section at the end of the book titled “A note on the text,” whose first sentence is the pithy, “This text was set in Christ knows what by who knows whom,” or the section titled “A note on the people” that follows it. show less