The Weight of This World

The Weight of This World by David Joy is a red-neck noir story set in Appalachia. The story centers on two boys, Thad an unloved child of rape, and Aiden, the child of a father who killed both himself and his mother. The two boys grow up together in a dilapidated trailer and forge a strong bond. They think of themselves as brothers. Thad goes to war and comes back a damaged vet and needs the strength of Aiden, along with plenty of booze and meth to help him get through the days. His mother, April, haunted by her own experiences, has also learned to lean on Aiden for comfort and support. All three lives are about to be shattered when the boy’s drug dealer accidentally shots himself. This triggers a series of drug-addled situations that show more spiral out of control.

I have a weakness for books set in Appalachia. It is a totally different world from the one I live in and I am both fascinated and repelled by it’s dark beauty. The mountains of North Carolina make a lush backdrop to this brutal tale. But as dark and tragic as the story is, I came to care for all these troubled characters.

Despite the sense of inevitability that the author infuses throughout the story, The Weight of This World was an outstanding read. David Joy is an author that I will be looking for again as I was impressed by both his descriptive powers and his realistic dialogue. show less

He wasn't sorry then and he wasn't sorry now. There was wickedness in this world that swallowed any light that might've been, darkness that could be answered only with darkness.

The Weight of This World by David Joy tells the story of Aidan McCall and his friendship with Thad Broom. When Aidan was twelve, he watched his father shoot his mother and then himself. This is the opening scene in the book and certainly paves the way for the rest of it. Aidan eventually ends up living in a trailer with his buddy, Thad, who was moved out of his house by his new step-father. The two boys raise themselves, Thad eventually joining the army and serving in Afghanistan, but returning to live in the same single-wide and to the same life of picking up show more occasional work, but mainly getting by by stripping foreclosed houses of their copper wiring. Aidan would like to leave the hamlet of Little Canada, in the mountains of North Carolina, to go to Asheville or maybe even further afield, somewhere where the jobs paid better and were easier to find. He's trying to save a little, but Thad is content to spend whatever money they come by on booze and meth.

It's the meth that gets them in trouble.

The Weight of This World fits into the sort of gritty Appalachian noir of Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollock. There's a lot of violence, some of it breath-taking in it's random casualness, and a bleak sense of place that shows in both the beauty of the mountains and hollows, and in the relentless poverty of the people living there. There are grace notes and Joy never forgets to write his characters, large and small, as real people, but this isn't a book for the faint of heart. show less

Well you certainly don’t read a David Joy book, looking for an uplifting experience. To say the characters in this book are broken, is a dire understatement. I don’t know these people, I don’t know people who know these people. I went to western Kentucky and eastern West Virginia way back in 1997, and remember thinking these places look like the land that Time forgot. They were beyond depressing. And this was before Meth and Oxy, and heroin had further ravaged these places.
So why 5 stars for this book?
Because Davis Joy- the Author, has a way with words, think James Lee Burke, the writing is that good. You are so perfectly and seamlessly planted into this world, a world of a thoroughly broken young man Thad, who is further show more shattered and destroyed after serving in Afghanistan, whose mother-April has never loved him, and hasn’t hidden her resentment for him, ever. A woman who is used and beaten- physically, mentally, and emotionally by everyone whom she has ever been involved with. These two are joined by Aiden a childhood friend who moved in with Thad after watching his father murder his mother, and then blow his own brains out.
But oh my god, the writing is amazing.
Read this author, he is that good. show less

Well you certainly don’t read a David Joy book, looking for an uplifting experience. To say the characters in this book are broken, is a dire understatement. I don’t know these people, I don’t know people who know these people. I went to western Kentucky and eastern West Virginia way back in 1997, and remember thinking these places look like the land that Time forgot. They were beyond depressing. And this was before Meth and Oxy, and heroin had further ravaged these places.
So why 5 stars for this book?
Because Davis Joy- the Author, has a way with words, think James Lee Burke, the writing is that good. You are so perfectly and seamlessly planted into this world, a world of a thoroughly broken young man Thad, who is further show more shattered and destroyed after serving in Afghanistan, whose mother-April has never loved him, and hasn’t hidden her resentment for him, ever. A woman who is used and beaten- physically, mentally, and emotionally by everyone whom she has ever been involved with. These two are joined by Aiden a childhood friend who moved in with Thad after watching his father murder his mother, and then blow his own brains out.
But oh my god, the writing is amazing.
Read this author, he is that good. show less

At one point in David Joy’s novel Aiden McCall thinks, “Every year bled into the next, just on and on until the day he’d die, and maybe that was all there was to look forward to anymore. Maybe that’s all there is to this old life, just waiting around to die.” The Weight of This World is the story of three very battered individuals, living together in the North Carolina hills, bound by personal history and tragedy. Thad Broom and Aiden McCall were childhood friends. Thad and his mother April saved Aiden when he escaped from an orphanage and needed a home. Aiden was there for Thad when he returned from Afghanistan, emotionally scarred by what he’d seen and done. April, Thad’s mother, has her own tragic past and is haunted show more with the consequences. Fueled by their individual histories, drugs and alcohol, things go irretrievably awry when a drug deal ends unexpectedly and Thad and Aiden attempt to make good out of a windfall. It’s here where the reader begins to believe that yes, life is just waiting around to die, especially for these three.

The Weight of This World is intense and brutal, sometimes painful to read, but also a testament to love and friendship at all costs. show less

This was phenomenal story all the way through. Don't come into a David joy novel without expecting every single character to be broken all to shit, because that's what the man excels in...broken people begging and stealing and crying out for redemption.

David Joy, for me, is like a darker, grimmer John Hart. They both write beautifully, and see the world through mostly cynical eyes, but damn, can they tell a story.

The only thing that had me pulling a star off this one was the lack of a specific ending. And I'm not talking the last bit, I'm talking the bit before the last bit (yeah, I ain't gonna spoil the novel, so you'll have to read it to get what I'm talking about here).

It was a small flaw in an otherwise stunning novel.

The weight of this world has weighed heavily on the shoulders of the three main characters. Thad is back from a tour in Afghanistan and can’t come to terms with the horrific event that happened there. His mother, April, has her own secrets and violent past that she’s battling to get out from under. And Aidan watched his father kill himself and Aidan’s mother when he was a child. There’s no honest work to be found so Thad and Aidan find some dishonest work and both turn to alcohol and drugs to get through their days. When their drug dealer violently dies, his drugs and money are theirs but only if they can stay away from the meth long enough to figure out what to do with it.

Doesn’t sound too cheery, does it? This is a very dark show more book but that isn’t what bothered me about this one. We each have our own demons to bear and while some people’s demons may be worse than others, we all have choices to make in life. We can choose to blame our rotten luck and we can blame our stupid choices on others. But in the end, those choices are ours to make and we really only have ourselves to blame for them. This author didn’t seem to see it that way.

In reading the glowing reviews of this book, I expected to feel great compassion for these characters. They certainly had been through a lot and I tried to feel compassionate for them. But while I felt sympathy for them, I also felt turned off by them and their choices. I now read those glowing reviews and wonder how the writers of those reviews could have read the same book as I did. At one point Aidan says, “Perhaps God just had it out for certain folks and he’d been borne one of the unlucky ones.” That’s pretty much the theme of the whole book.

So why am I giving it even 3 stars? The writing is really beautiful. Here’s one random example taken from an Advanced Reading Copy so the wording may change in the final edition:

“They crawled along the edges of great cairns, stones the size of houses balanced with an unfathomable gravity as if they’d been set just so by the hands of some watchmaker god.”

The beauty of the language the author uses in some places contrasts sharply with the rough, coarse language used elsewhere. If these characters could have looked around them at the beauty that the author was describing instead of wallowing in their miserable pasts, their spirits would have lifted. While I found the book unpleasant to read, it really is a brilliant lesson on why you shouldn’t let the weight of the world weigh you down.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world. ~ Helen Keller show less