February Bonus Book Review
"The Third Rainbow Girl" is really two books...and only one really works. But it REALLY works.
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s the subscribers-only book review for February, selected by y’all — Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia. The short form: very strong first two-thirds, then it kind of falls apart, but the author’s got the goods.
The crime
On a summer evening in 1980, two women hitchhiking to a festival called The Rainbow Gathering were murdered; their bodies were left in an out-of-the-way clearing in an already out-of-the-way part of West Virginia, Pocahontas County. A dozen years later, based in no small part on local law enforcement’s insistence that a “local” had to be responsible, an area farmer was convicted of the killings — then released years later when a racist serial killer claimed he had killed Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero.
The story
Emma Copley Eisenberg can write, let’s get that right up top — and that’s both the gift and the curse of The Third Rainbow Girl, which is two stories braided together. The first book is the long, strange trip of the “Rainbow Girls” case: how long it took to crack, how thin the case was against Jacob Beard, how foul a cloud Joseph Paul Franklin cast over so many lives in so many states, and how hard the state of West Virginia literally and the state of Appalachia figuratively is to understand if you haven’t spent any real time there. In that first three-fifths of the book, Eisenberg paints a picture of a time, of places, that has its poetry but is also economical, like describing Pocahontas County as a “jagged raindrop” in shape; pointing out that “saying no to a thing is not the same as saying yes to its opposite”; or page 54, which is just about the most wincily distilled portal into being 20 years old I’ve ever read:
I don’t want to be one of those girls who doesn’t shave her legs and then shaves them when her boyfriend comes to visit, I said at some point that summer, standing in the pantry of the office building where we stored our cans of beans. I had a gentle floppy-haired boyfriend from college, who would be arriving any minute.
You don’t want to be, the girl from Kentucky said, tapping her foot against an interesting rock she’d dragged inside. But you are.
Alas, what Eisenberg also is is pre-occupied with her potential Heisenberging of the community she’s come to help, then research; and with her own journey to self. Eisenberg isn’t wrong to interrogate American culture’s tendency to make grand pronouncements about Appalachia from a place of knowing exactly fuck-all, and to that extent, her mini-memoir of her life and loves when she lived on Droop Mountain is relevant context.
But as the narrative goes on, her control falters; she’s still tops at those two-stroke sketches of the key players in the case (“feelings,” she says of one cop, are “not his first language”), but as Beard’s trial proceeds, we start getting strained recitations of Eisenberg’s research on recovered memory and cognitive processing — also relevant context, and not uninteresting, but you can feel how badly she wants to end that section and get back in her MFA feels. That sounds meaner than I feel about the back third of the book, but when she despairs of the sound-bite renditions of the region — “reporters zoomed in and out and had days to construct a totalizing story” — I have to wonder if Eisenberg doesn’t go too far in the opposite direction. The last 100 pages is not a slog, quite, but it is extended navel-gazing about her impatience with her stray cat, her apparently bankrupt relationship with a man named Jesse, and the mutual “harm” she and Pocahontas County were causing each other. Maybe she isn’t oversubscribing the effect she had on the locals, and I’ve got nothing against prose poems about the people we didn’t belong with, but it’s a fundamentally different book that’s not quite what’s described on the tin.
With all of that said, Eisenberg still has a certain way with the story even after it kind of crashes into the memoir underbrush. I make MFA jokes, but there’s something about this coda to a story of a camp-out where Durian’s and Santomero’s bodies were found that any other writer is going to stop on too: “Story speaking, nothing happened; it was just another night we slept in the woods as men and women from there and elsewhere. But I began to think about it all the time” (249). The last stretch is a bit frustrating in terms of needing editorial discipline, but at the same time, it’s really a compelling read in a “why is this losing me” sense; I wanted the editor to have stepped in with an X-Acto, but I didn’t hate trying to “solve” it from a process standpoint. And the fact is, the frustration stems from feeling like there is an all-time, taught-in-schools crime book in Eisenberg, that when she finds that case or that trial that she’s not in, where she can keep that elliptical imagism in a narrower lane, we’re going to see some shit.
But this isn’t bad! It’s very good. It should have been great, maybe, and it’s not quite there. I still recommend it, though; just do what I couldn’t and bail it around page 215. And don’t sleep on Eisenberg. — SDB