Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls
What's It About?
A rip-roaring, action-packed novel set during Prohibition filled with head-spinning plot twists and dead bodies, doomed romances, and sudden betrayals.Thanks to the rage for popular history, Americans have been treated to hundreds of images of the Roaring Twenties. Although a full century has passed since the ascension of flappers, jazz, blues, speakeasies and airplanes, the wonder and calamity of those years have become familiar to us through film and literature.
Among the most indelible images are the cars: the rumrunners’ cars racing along country roads, transporting bootleg and moonshine away from the watchful eyes of Prohibition agents. The first line of Jeannette Walls’ stunning new novel, Hang the Moon (Scribner), portends those wild rides:
“The fastest girl in the world. That’s what I’m going to be.”
Thus begins a story of delusion and tragedy among the Kincaid clan of rural north-central Virginia. The family has deep, wide roots that keep getting dug up, revelations that will take your breath away. All the way back to a Confederate ancestor, the Kincaids have practiced their own flights from the law whether the problem is murder, gang warfare, or inconvenient realities.
Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of “Duke,” son of “the Colonel” who bought up thousands of acres of mountains, valleys, and rivers after the Civil War. Like his father, Duke runs Claiborne County as a benevolent dictator, ostensibly looking out for everyone yet tolerating Jim Crow and the exploitation of women.
In Claiborne County, women aren’t even on the bottom rung. They are in thrall to men, trodden on except when they are useful. Whether a woman lives in a dirty shack with five starving children or catches the eye of a wealthy man and gets to live in style, she is doomed.
Sallie absorbs this lesson early when Duke sends her off to live with her Aunt Faye, yet another struggling woman banished from the community. Nine years later, when Sallie finally returns home after the death of Duke’s third wife — who had loathed and dismissed her — she is determined to never be hurt again.
But then, in the middle of a late summer picnic, Duke dies jumping off a railroad trestle into a very deep lake. It was a boyhood rite of passage that he remembered fondly as he corralled the other picnickers, including Sallie, into jumping.
MAGNIFICENTLY BROUGHT TO LIFE
Here, the story explodes. Until this moment, half-siblings, aunts and uncles, a fourth wife, interlopers, and loyal lieutenants have been stitched into their own corners and understand the boundaries. Now Walls starts to rip the seams apart, spilling secrets, pain, and very little joy.
There’s a new sheriff in town, as the saying goes. Sallie’s Aunt Mattie and her husband Earl seize control of the Kincaid empire: a general store, real estate, and the illegal liquor trade. Mattie and Earl are greedy but they’re willing to share with Sallie if she will do the dirty work of squeezing tenants and bootleggers for every last penny.
“They can all slice that bacon a little thinner,” Mattie retorts when Sallie pleads for kindness to renters like Abraham Crockett, who lives on Hopewell Road, where all Black residents are relegated. Next Sallie visits the white Bond boys, also outcasts, orphans living in the woods, to demand that they pay a new still tax. The Bonds are furious and will seek revenge.
Sallie sees everything that’s unjust and ugly in Claiborne County, but she continues to live in the Kincaid mansion with Nell, a maid; Kat, Duke’s widow; Eddie, the shy brilliant son of Duke and his third wife, Jane; and Aunt Faye, whom Sallie has rescued from impoverished isolation.
Before long, another family member dies tragically and the tables are turned again. Mary, Duke’s daughter by his first wife, inherits the house and businesses. She sweeps into town towing her new husband Phillip, a minister. Sallie expects the worst because years earlier her own mother seduced Duke away from Mary’s mother. But Sallie is surprised to find Mary warm and welcoming, perhaps a result of her newfound religiosity.
A WILD RIDE
There is a twist, however. Mary and Phillip are fervent Prohibitionists who quickly wipe out the Kincaid fortune when they wrest control from Mattie and Earl and halt all illegal liquor business. In doing so, they bring down the economy of Claiborne County.
Eventually, it will be up to Sallie to make things right. She masterminds war and peace with the Bond brothers, races along those country roads at midnight, and begins to undo the harm her family has inflicted on the county.
Above all, Sallie keeps her family close, including two babies who are not technically Kincaids but belong inside the circle. And she accomplishes all of this while rejecting love, losing love, and finally finding the promise of love when she least expects it.
I was not surprised to learn that the author was originally inspired by the Tudor dynasty, for Hang the Moon is a family epic brimming with romance, heroism, and loss.
Jeannette Walls evokes the small towns and landscape of a place unfamiliar to most readers. Yet she has set her story against a backdrop that we recognize. It is the 1920s, a time of social and cultural upheaval in American history, magnificently brought to life as if it were yesterday.
About the author:
Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona and grew up in the American Southwest and Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York for twenty-five years, writing for New York Magazine, Esquire, and MSNBC. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years, has been translated into more than thirty languages and was made into a film starring Brie Larson. She is also the author of the best-selling novels The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. Her new novel, Hang the Moon, will be published by Scribner in March 2023. Walls lives in central Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.
