David Joy and Those We Thought We Knew
I first introduced David Joy in 2020 as one of the Southern writers who began their careers after 2000. A native North Carolinian, Joy continues his life as a “true outdoorsman,” residing in the Little Canada community in Jackson County, NC. Despite his academic background—he holds two degrees from Western Carolina University–, he sees himself as both a writer and a “wanderer of the woods.”
Since 2011, David Joy has published a memoir, Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey (2011) and five novels: Where All Light Tends to Go (2015); The Weight of This World (2017); The Line That Held Us (2018), When These Mountains Burn (2020), and Those We Thought We Knew (2023). Joy’s novels have been nominated for several prizes including the Edgar award for a best first novel for Where All the Light Tends to Go; he has also received a Fellowship from The North Carolina Arts Council, the Willie Morris award for Southern fiction for Those We Thought We Knew, and, most recently, this novel was selected by North Carolina Humanities for the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington DC.
Joy’s fiction clearly shows the “rough south” as depicted by writers like Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, Larry Brown, and Ron Rash. Joy has described his work, all of it set in the immediate present, as telling “dark, often hopeless stories of working class people doing the best they can with the circumstances they’re given.” Rebecca Godwin asserts that “[h]is damaged characters, living with violence, trauma, misogyny, and drug addiction, seek redemption in their hardscrabble worlds,” but escape seems impossible for most of them.
Ahead of Those We Thought We Knew, Joy novels featured young male characters struggling against poverty, family brutality, and drug and alcoholic addiction. Where All Light Tends to Go, is a “rough south” coming-of-age novel that features Jacob McNeely. Devil’s Peak, a film version of the novel came out in 2023, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright and Hopper Penn. Joy and Robert Knott wrote the screen play for the film.
The Weight of This World tells the story of Thad Broom’s return to North Carolina after serving in Afghanistan. He reunites with his mother, who has troubles of her own, and his old friend Aiden McCall. The Line That Held Us traces the aftermath of a horrific hunting accident that leads Darl Moody and his friend Calvin Hopper into a battle for their lives. In When These Mountains Burn, Joy returns to the mountain drug culture and a father’s attempt to bail out his addicted son. This novel won the Dashiell Hammett Award.
Joy’s latest novel, Those That We Thought We Knew, offers a definite change from his earlier works. First, Joy creates a highly believable trio of Black and White female characters: Toya Gardner, her grandmother Ves Jones and Leah Green, a white detective. Of them, reviewer Toby LeBlanc writes,
It is women. . . who tow the moral load throughout the novel. The heroines, not the 4 x 4 pickups driven by the men, move mountains. Their vision is so clear, their touch so deft—they are the counterbalance to the concentrated evil of racism running rampant. Their virtue stands in . . . sharp contrast to the failings of the men around them.
In this era of racial tension, Joy, a white man, took a chance in creating Black female characters; he is, however, equally forthcoming in his treatment of the White racism that continues to pervade an isolated community more than 150 years after the Civil War. In this rural environment, White disdain for Blacks hides itself behind blinders of both ignorance and continued pride in a tradition that many of their ancestors did not even share during the years of the Confederacy. Finally, Joy also deals with rural corruption in both politics and law enforcement. Again, many think this kind of corruption is urban rather than universal.
Those that We Thought We Knew tells the story of Toya Gardner, whose mother grew up in rural Western North Carolina, but escaped to Atlanta, Georgia, and became a lawyer Toya, a talented artist from childhood, grew up primarily in Atlanta, but spent time with her grandparents in North Carolina and developed an affinity for the area. She returns to her grandmother’s home at the age of 24, while completing an MFA degree in art; she is looking for a subject for her final project. She finds her subject but also discovers the racism the community keeps hidden. She becomes particularly incensed when she learns that a Black church and its cemetery were “relocated” years earlier. A Confederate statue also angers her. Highly intelligent, strong, and outspoken, she mounts a protest that, to say the least, ends badly.
The novel, then, evolves as a sort of detective thriller. Joy’s characters are various: Toya and her grandmother; a horrendous outsider from Mississippi; a local deputy beat up by members of a secretly activated chapter of the Ku Klux Klan; a longtime sheriff who has been a friend of Toya’s grandparents; and, the young female detective out to solve her first murder case. The plot seems somewhat contrived, predictable, and, at the end, melodramatic, but Joy’s characters save the novel. As, in his earlier novels, Joy’s strength in Those We Thought We Knew lies, too, in the authenticity of his setting. He knows every “nook and cranny” of this seemingly pastoral area and successfully presents its beauty with genuine knowledge of its flora and fauna. The underbelly of racism and other corruption of its people, however, tarnish this natural beauty.
