Winter People by John Ehle

In the 1930s in the mountains of North Carolina lives a young unmarried woman and her baby by an unnamed father. Down off the mountain comes a clock maker and his 14-year-old daughter, lost after leaving their broken-down truck. The woman befriends them and takes the man to meet her father and three brothers, enlisting their help in setting the man up in business. The mountain family appears to be a tiny bit eccentric, with jealousy between the brothers and perhaps some sexual jealousy on the part of the youngest brother about his sister and her mystery lover. Then the clock maker and the young woman fall in love, but one night the mystery lover comes back and all hell breaks loose.

I hope that's not too much of a plot spoiler; I don't think so, because the events have a feeling of inevitability and are easily anticipated. Anyway, it's the characterization, the dialogue, and the tone which make this novel exceptional. Ehle's characters jump off the page, and the conversations read like transcripts of recordings. The tone progresses from a companionable folksiness to one of high tragedy. Quite a writing feat, Mr. Ehle.

This novel reminded me very much of Faulkner, specifically of The Sound and the Fury. The writing style is not nearly as convoluted as Faulkner's, but the sense of hovering tragedy and of barely controlled violence is the same. The plot situation has some similarities, and the people seem to have the same primitive emotions under a veneer of respectability. Perhaps it should be assigned the genre of "Mountain Gothic."

This is an older book, first published in 1982, but I found it and so can you. Recommended.