Reviewed: Lords of St. Thomas, by Jackson Ellis. Publisher: Green Writers Press, 4/18. Paperback $19.95, 184pp.

Home // January.9.2018 // Jon Maniscalco

Facing Down the Floodwaters

It's always exciting to read a first novel that has flow, grace, and rhythm—one which excites you for the new author's future. Jackson Ellis has written such a novel.

Lords of St. Thomas is an emotional, fast paced story about fighting for what is yours and the consequences of doing so. The novel focuses on young Henry Lord and his family as they fight with the government to keep their home, as the situation becomes increasingly dire. This story gives readers an opportunity to think about how much their home and way of life is worth, and how long they'd stand up to a force coming to take it away.

The force here isn't quite like the banks in The Grapes of Wrath who take possession of the land of the Joads and their neighbors through the control of debt and interests. Instead, it's the federal government, bribing the residents of the town to leave. However, though the government's cash handouts seem kinder than repossession, its actions are just as ruthless. This seems especially true as seen through the eyes of Henry's grandfather.

The novel is built around a theme of the unwillingness to leave, and begins with two of the family members fleeing. In the opening pages, Henry and his grandfather are climbing into a dingy floating in the rising water surrounding their home. As the motor starts and the boat brings them away, his grandfather throws a match at the house, igniting the gasoline he'd poured over the upper story. The house burns as they pull further and further away from what's left of their fight. This opening introduces readers to the futility of resisting the odds against them. Perhaps the fate of the Joads might not have been any better if they'd stayed in Oklahoma.

The story takes place mostly in St. Thomas, Nevada, a town threatened by lake waters rising due the construction of the Hoover Dam. From the beginning, Henry's grandfather refuses to leave, denying the calculations of the engineers and claiming the water will never reach their home. This attitude causes a rift between Henry's grandfather and father, which is the source of an intense and well-written argument between a father and son about principal versus practicality.

The impracticality of staying hits the family hard and fast. As people leave in droves, the family's auto garage suffers, and the town becomes a skeleton of what it was. Henry's father, despite a long absence from his son and home, believes it is more important to keep the family intact rather than fight to the bitter end to keep ownership of something of their own that can't be touched. He takes a dangerous government job—despite the government's role in taking his house and pushing away his father—because it pays well, and he himself hopes someday to afford a home. He's never able to, though, for reasons I cannot share without revealing a major and tragic plot point.

Henry's mother also goes through a change. She experiences the effects of the dam early, being a schoolteacher in a town that suddenly has no students. The rising waters take her livelihood and prompt her to support her husband's decision to leave. After tragedy impacts her, too, she becomes more adamant on staying than even Henry's grandfather.

These different reactions to the impending doom in their town raise questions of individual rights versus the social contract inherent in government authority. The family, like other small-holders in the town, own their land. The government has a right to buy that land. But the idea that this is an amicable purchase is absurd, since the decision to build the dam is made before the transaction.

It's less like a purchase and more like a shakedown. Many readers will have seen or read The Godfather—another saga of an American family trying to reconcile the values of the past with the needful changes of the present—and probably remember the scene where Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) tells his girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton) how his fictional father, the Godfather himself, Don Vito, got singer Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) out of his contract. First, he offers ten thousand dollars. When that's refused, he threatens to kill the manager. Only then is a deal struck. In Lords of St. Thomas, the friendly government man with the fat buyout represents the ten grand, and the floodwaters symbolize Luca Brazi holding his gun.

Ellis creates a thrilling story where readers measure how much they value their rights and how far they're willing to fight for them. It's a timely read, too, at this moment when fracking is destroying modern rural communities, and the twin powers of eminent domain and corporate payments further complicating the decision to stay or go, to sell or resist. Ellis does a compelling job of showing the family's nearly noble hopelessness in their fight to change a fait accompli, without capitulating to sentimentality. This tragic note gives a particular, Steinbeckian vividness to the familiar templates of multigenerational family tale (the story of the Lords) and the American coming-of-age narrative (the story of little Henry).

With thanks to Rosie Carter for her editorial contributions to this review.

Banner graphic source: Photo (detail) of ruins at St. Thomas, Nevada, formerly submerged under Lake Mead. Taken by Daniel Jost, and posted to Wikimedia Commons. Used here under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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