Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.
As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them. Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it—in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now. Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning. So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch.
ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight, follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis. Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil. But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise, ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.
The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved. Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child. These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books. In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.
Avalon, Rise is a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn. Like Abiyoyo, it is also a very direct story about facing evil with courage. Avalon, Rise makes the case on nearly every page that opposing the Big Bad is necessary. But that basic principle, the book suggests, does not make standing up to those who would destroy a community easy. Indeed, the ever-shifting balance between clarity and complication is central to the novel.
ffitch is able to maintain this balance largely because she seems to have little interest in demonstrating purity—either her own or that of her characters. Avalon, Rise doesn’t care if its characters do the precisely correct thing. As a result, it achieves the rare feat of having a distinct sense of right and wrong, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. It becomes an exploration of how confusing and hard it is to be good.
Abiyoyo is set in a village united, as one of Avalon, Rise’s characters puts it, by annoyance and fear. The annoyance is at the dad and son, who are such inconsiderate neighbors that the town exiles them; the fear is of Abiyoyo, a perhaps-mythical man-eating giant. But when Abiyoyo actually shows up one morning, the ostracized father-son duo comes up with a clever strategy to defeat him, saving the town and redeeming themselves in the process. All of these plot points—and really, these characters—appear in ffitch’s novel.
In Avalon, Rise, the village is Avalon, Ohio, which seems to be loosely based on the real town of Athens. Its menacing giant is white nationalism, embodied by a true believer named Stasia—the “Volk Mother” or “OdinistMama” online—who moves to Avalon and begins recruiting in its community. But rather than having one parent and a child to defeat the villain, ffitch fills Avalon, Rise with a sprawling, endearing, enraging group of characters who are, if not outcasts, distinctly at the town’s margins.
There’s Avalon’s social worker, who holds herself a bit apart from the community she serves; there’s the wishy-washy librarian who, by trying to agree with everyone she talks with, ends up going back constantly on her word; there are the anti-fascist organizers with bad attitudes and too many piercings. Over the course of the novel, which has the conviction of a manifesto but the relaxed, raucous narrative quality of a good shaggy-dog story, ffitch gets all of these characters to come together to deal not only with Stasia but also with the residents of Avalon who are willing, and in some cases eager, to enable her.
[Read: A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way]
Stasia’s leading enabler, Woody, is, perhaps counterintuitively, also Avalon, Rise’s moral center. What I mean is that he’s the character who struggles the hardest. He is a printmaker and an addict (any reader who was disappointed, as I was, by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will get a more nuanced and less dramatic portrait of drug addiction in Appalachia here). His prized possession is a milk crate of children’s books—including, pointedly, Abiyoyo—that he refers to regularly as sources of artistic inspiration, comfort during withdrawal, entertainment for his 4- and 7-year-old nephews, and guidance for when he doesn’t know what to do.
Woody gets sucked into Stasia’s orbit after she commissions him to print flyers for her “European Heritage Rug Braiding” workshops. Stasia’s barn contains an old Vandercook, a 20th-century printing press that Woody reveres so much that he has “memorized its anatomy.” ffitch, who loves detailed terminology, luxuriates in Woody’s pleasure at just knowing “there was such thing as a half-pica lever, a sliding knee stick, a slug cutter, a cylinder eccentric,” let alone using them. Stasia allows him access to the press, and dangles the possibility of giving it to him. In Woody’s imagination, owning it would give him a real life as an artist, which, in turn, might help him stay clean. This desire, along with his addiction itself, makes him highly susceptible to Stasia’s manipulation, even as his mother and best friend lead very different efforts to organize against her.
Woody’s mother, Eloise, is Avalon’s people-pleasing librarian, a lifelong liberal activist who believes in civil discourse above all. On Stasia’s arrival, though, her commitment to this value is immediately shaken by the more forceful resistance proposed by the novel’s ragtag group of anti-fascists, which includes Woody’s childhood best friend, Leroi—a sweet, earnest mama’s boy who dreams of getting out of Avalon and becoming a vagabond. The novel’s goals include bringing its Lerois and its Eloises together, prodding them to collaborate despite their many disagreements.
[Read: A biting satire about the idealistic left]
But the novel’s deeper effort is to use political work—an “ordinary and necessary” part of life, ffitch has written—and the dissidence and quandaries it creates, to ask that each of its characters be brave in their own way. In every case, this means dealing with Stasia. For Woody, it also means reckoning with addiction, and for Eloise, recognizing that her desire to be an unjudgmental mother has led her to facilitating his drug abuse.
For Eloise’s older child, Emma, who has two young sons, it means admitting something even harder. ffitch is uncommonly good at writing, tenderly but without sentimentality, about people who both adore their children and make colossal errors in raising them. Emma, especially where her 7-year-old son, Martin, is concerned, falls into this category. Of their dynamic, ffitch writes, “Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him”—and she does. It’s only toward the end of the book that Emma admits that hitting her son isn’t a maternal instinct but rather a sign that she, herself, needs significant help.
By braiding these stories, and many more, into the tale of Avalon defeating its giant, ffitch tells a layered, sophisticated story that expresses a clear, ethical point of view without hammering readers on the head. Not many novels for adults do this successfully, but in children’s literature, it is one of the standards for a great book. ffitch includes many in Avalon, Rise: Abiyoyo but also Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Each of these books demands that its characters face their situation with courage; each one takes something that seems simple—burying a bird, celebrating Hanukkah, all sorts of mundane tasks in Frog and Toad—and surrounds it with not just emotional complication but also mischief, humor, and delight.
So, too, with Avalon, Rise, as it demonstrates that white supremacists are unwelcome in town. What Avalon, Rise understands as well as the classics of children’s literature is that when you’re a small, fallible, confused person, everything is exciting but almost nothing is easy. What it understands as well as any great adult novel is how hard it is to get people to work together, no matter how high the stakes. In bringing these two clear yet complicated pieces of knowledge together, ffitch has written a remarkable book.