The Wettest County in the World

Starred review from June 9, 2008
This fictionalized tale of Depression-era bootlegging from Bondurant (The Third Translation
) enlists the help of Winesburg, Ohio
author Sherwood Anderson to investigate Bondurant family lore. In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant’s real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They’re after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest’s throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area’s prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson’s arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs “meticulously shattered” from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men. Bondurant endows his gritty story with all the puzzle-solving satisfactions of a mystery. It’s a gripping, relentless tale, delivered in no-nonsense prose.