In The Line That Held Us...the two men are decent, ordinary guys (and their friendship so truly realized it's applause-worthy), their crime is terrifying, ultimate, tragic—and their punishment is Biblical. The result is riveting. And the greatest success in the book is the creation of Dwayne Brewer. When we first meet him he's brutal and overbearing, but also playful and capable of accessing a kind of honest morality ... the loss of that other self [his brother] unbalances Dwayne in ways Joy never allows to become entirely predictable, or entirely loathsome. The Line That Held Us is an autopsy of what friendship really is—its assumptions, its limits, its obligations. But the dark current of revenge constantly pulling at the narrative is what many readers will recall the longest after they've put the book down.
The plot of David Joy’s third novel, The Line That Held Us, is simple ... The complexity of the novel comes in Joy’s evocative language, his unforgettable characters and how he weaves themes of family, friendship and justice throughout this darkly engrossing Southern crime noir ... Joy has been heralded for his ability to craft a powerful sense of place in his previous novels ... He does so again in The Line That Held Us, bringing the Appalachian region and lifestyle to life. But it is his unforgettable characters and their moral dilemmas that will stay with you in the end.
Joy’s third novel, The Line That Held Us, may have a lower body count than his first two, but there’s still plenty of gore ... The things that capture Joy’s attention are often grounded in the physical world. He devotes nearly an entire page to the mechanics of fieldstripping a pistol, another half-page to the composition of a concrete block-laying crew, and is often preoccupied with what his characters are doing with their bodies. Lines like, 'Calvin walked back toward the couch with one hand down his sweatpants, the other holding his drink against the center of his chest,' are common, but don't always serve the story ... within Joy’s otherwise powerful, lyrical fiction, Appalachia’s real-life complexity and diversity aren’t often apparent ... Despite some shortcomings, The Line That Held Us is a suspenseful page-turner, complete with one of the absolutely killer endings that have become one of Joy’s signatures.
The Line That Held Us delves deep into the characters’ background and motives ... Joy also tempers The Line That Held Us with a look at how the area [Appalachia] is changing, as wealthy people build weekend homes, destroy the landscape or improve it, depending on the point of view. A way of life is ending ... The Line That Held Us continues Joy’s gritty look at families and the land that shapes them in his unique brand of Southern gothic.
David Joy likes and respects his characters. From his native North Carolina, they are working men, hunting men, in the iconic, laconic model of the independent, often ornery, American male ... As Dwayne plots and rages, Joy invests him and the other protagonists with the high, formal diction of fated tragedy ... as the novel barrels close to violent retribution, it stutters and hesitates. The end comes out of left field, not at all what we were led to expect. I will leave it to you to decide whether Joy has cheated on his plotting or allowed his characters an unforeseen grace.
The book’s title is in the past tense because in this tale, the line between civilization and savagery doesn’t hold ... The result is a chilling tale of vengeance that ends well for no one. It is well told in a voice that is lyrical in its descriptions of the region’s natural beauty and graphic in its depictions of violence and death, but isn’t a book for fans of thrillers or who-done-its in which the good guys always win.
The Brewers are a family notorious for vengeance and violence ... When Dwayne Brewer can't find his missing sibling, he seeks vengeance on...the last people to see Dwayne's brother alive ... Joy, whose debut novel, Where All the Light Tends To Go, was an Edgar Award finalist, delivers a stunning third Southern noir novel (after Weight of This World). Fans of Ron Rash will love the atmospheric Appalachian setting wrapped up in a suspenseful plot.
Joy has proved adept with southern noir in his first two novels ... and he nails it again here, in the actions of characters who act as they must, for the sake of family and friendship, given their nature. This is fiction as beautiful and compelling as it is searing.
Joy...pulls no punches in this stark and violent examination of sacrifice and suffering ... The eerie presence of Sissy’s dead body throughout the novel...compounds the paranoia that builds alongside Dwayne’s and Calvin’s troubled ruminations, culminating by the end in the powerful possibility of collective redemption. Fans of Frank Bill and Cormac McCarthy will enjoy this gritty thriller.
To be fair, there are some competent fight scenes. And Sissy’s decomposing body is nicely visceral. And in between the melodrama and cliché, Joy does manage a few inspired local details ... But for the most part this book is a sculpture of lazy sentences...and prepackaged profundity ... Pretentious, overtold, and transparent—Joy mistakes literary allusion for literary merit.
