Award-winning author and St. Louis native Scott Alexander Hess has penned a pair of thematically connected novellas that explore family, fate, and a connection to nature. The Root of Everything is a multi-generational saga of fathers and sons throughout the decades—from the 1900s to 1990s—as they leave Germany’s Black Forest for the lumberyards of Missouri and experience tragedy, triumph, forbidden love, and hard-earned reckonings. In Lightning, a young man in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1918 faces the death of multiple family members in one momentous year. Driven by his deep love for horses and his emerging feelings for another man, he is offered a chance to move to New York City and is forced to face his true destiny.
Having reviewed his 2019 novel, River Runs Red, I picked up on themes running through Hess’ work, including family, place (the longtime New Yorker’s stories often harken back to the St. Louis area), mysticism, and integrated homosexuality—meaning the sexuality of his characters, while fully (and tastefully) revealed, is just one aspect of their role in the story. Hess’ novels don’t feel like “gay literature.” They feel like literature that weaves in gay experience.
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“My aim is always to get humanity on the page, to express everyone’s uniqueness and challenges. Their sexuality is just one element of who they are,” Hess says.
On the return to his roots, Hess says: “While my early fiction was very New York City–centric and more transgressive, my later work has brought me closer to my roots in Missouri and St. Louis. I am drawn to personal histories and varied time periods. The initial inspiration for The Root of Everything began when I heard the story of my grandfather’s leaving Germany to travel to the 1904 World’s Fair. I was fascinated reading about the work back then in lumber camps and this fired up my love of setting and the role of nature and land in my work, as it relates to the storytelling. As a writer, I cut my teeth studying brilliant people like William H. Gass [a Missouri writer], whose story The Pedersen Kid has some of the best descriptive setting I’ve ever read, and Cormac McCarthy whose prose is pure genius as seen in his amazing novel Blood Meridian. I truly am a writer who loves language.”
Hess will be in discussion with author and playwright Donald Miller at 7 p.m. Thursday, hosted online through Left Bank Books.
