Josh Weil’s debut, The New Valley, consists of three novellas set in the remote hills of Virginia. The narratives touch each other tangentially, unified by the handsome territory, the isolation of the three protagonists, and the obstacles faced in surmounting that solitude.

The first novella, “Ridge Weather” follows Osby Caudill in the wake of his father’s suicide. Like his father, Osby is a solitary man; his father, Cortland, felt a kinship with his beef herd more than other people, and the crux of the narrative is Osby bucking against his fear that he’s the same way. Thus, he makes several attempts to connect with other people—a boyhood friend, a lonely gas station attendant, and an overzealous college student to whom he rents his father’s old room—but the feeling of separateness overwhelms him. It’s clear early on and throughout the rest of the collection that Weil can deftly craft wounded characters that are unwittingly funny, and endear his readers to them while keeping the prose convincing. When the gas station attendant, Deb, invites Osby over to her place and takes his hands in hers, it comes back to the cows: “His hands felt huge in hers, like slabs of meat that had nothing to do with him.”

His father’s suicide leaves Osby in a state of emotional paralysis; coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally—it becomes clear by the end of the collection that Weil seems partial to such parallels—one of the Caudill’s steers comes down with grass tetany and is likewise paralyzed. Osby becomes obsessed with reviving the steer, and it’s evident that he’s transferred his own state to it: “He’ll be all right, Osby thought, until he isn’t.”

Weil’s second novella, “Stillman Wing,” follows the main character of the same name. At seventy-one years—still a young buck, by his measure—Stillman is enraged when he is laid off from his job as a mechanic and decides to steal a relic of a tractor from his employer. As he bumbles through the labor of restoring the Deutz to its original glory, he ignores the signs of his aging. He maintains himself on a regimen of flax seeds and meditation. Contrast this with his daughter that he’s trying to keep from moving out—“a late-thirties woman whose gargantuan hams of shoulders hunched higher than his; his daughter, whose mere breathing was an epic, painstaking, sweat-producing task; Caroline, whose short skirts showed knees like blue secrets beneath swollen flesh; his Blueberry, as he had called her since she was little, seemed to have no trouble finding men.”

Stillman’s overbearing affection for his daughter can seem saccharine at times, and his paranoia born of his parents’ recklessness (they died while having sex in the cockpit of their airplane) feels too easy, but Weil’s prose continues to be refreshingly clear and unpretentious in such a way that it preserves a story that might come off as sentimental in the hands of a lesser writer.

The third novella, “Sarverville Remains,” is an epistolary piece, and the form is used to astounding affect. The narrative reveals itself through the one-way letters from Geoffrey, a developmentally disabled—or “diminished,” as one of his foster mother’s puts it—man in his thirties, to Waker, the husband of Linda, whom Geoffrey falls in love with. The reader discovers early on that Geoff was brutally assaulted, that Waker is in jail, and that the confinement of the latter was the result of his assaulting the former.

Geoffrey meets Linda one night through his friends that are still in high school, to whom Linda gives blowjobs after she gets off work. A friendship begins to form, and then something more than a friendship appears to form. Once Geoff is resolved to “have it out like growed men,” the narrative unfolds itself like a misshapen crime story of sorts. The dramatic irony reaches agonizing levels at times; Geoff, despite his shortcomings elsewhere, has the ability to remember conversation with absolute precision; thus, by his diligent account of the events as relayed to Waker, the reader is able to deduce the advent of this complex love triangle in a way that the narrator is unable to immediately comprehend.

The point of view is ambitious, and I will admit that I was wary from the outset (a first person narrative in the voice of a backwoods, developmentally disabled man with a perfect memory for conversation? Seriously?). But by the end, as the narrative is fully realized and its effect on Geoff has sunken in, the affect is genuinely devastating. Weil utilizes a similar approach as Mark Haddon’s in A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but achieves a greater emotional affect by far, and in a smaller space. The juxtaposition of the reader’s cognizance and Geoff’s emotional candor in his attempt to comprehend his love for Linda and what she refers to as “how mean adults can be” achieves such a striking disparity that this last novella alone would have marked The New Valley as a tremendous debut. The first two novellas, strong as they are, might pale slightly in comparison, if only because “Sarverville Remains” suggests Weil’s near mastery of form and tone at a stage when most writers are only warming up.

By Deena Drewis