"Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward

“Salvage the Bones” comes to us as a highly unlikely debut work of fiction from Jesmyn Ward. It combines deepest family devotion with rancorous feud, petty self-absorption with timeless love, minor quotidian problem with once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. There is heroism here, great love, stunning, thought-provoking symbolism, and an uncountable string of apt metaphors for everything from the sound of someone eating a cracker to the tumultuous sky during Hurricane Katrina.

Through it all, our fifteen-year-old, first-person heroine, Esch, reads of Medea in her mythology text and compares the boy she loves (and who has made her pregnant) to Jason. And it is an apt comparison, for he is duplicitous and dismissive – not father material. Father material does abound in the other male characters here: Esch’s Daddy, her oldest brother Randall, and Randall’s friend Big Henry, are all portrayed as worthy stalwarts, and each has Esch’s welfare foremost in his heart. This fact illustrates one of Ms. Ward’s great strengths: she populates her novel with balanced, nuanced characters – she then presses these characters into the epic natural disaster of Katrina.

Set in a small Gulf Coast town in Mississippi, “Salvage the Bones” recounts twelve days’ events – ten leading up to Katrina, the day of the storm, and the day after. So unlike Magriet de Moor’s “The Storm,” the actual hurricane occupies only a small part of the story – about a twelfth. This narrative’s beauty stems from the basic human strivings of its characters. Esch finds out she’s pregnant by a boy she burns for. Randall prepares for a basketball exhibition so he can be noticed by college recruiters; Esch’s brother Skeetah tries to bring his prize dog’s puppies successfully into the world. The coming storm’s menace roils below the surface and provides an echo for Esch’s sinking spirits. As Daddy struggles to get his children to help prepare the house – lay in supplies, board up windows – Esch and her brothers deal with life’s vagaries, some of which make us hopeless indeed.

Ms. Ward has accomplished something so human and endearing – I’ve seen this novel described as “big-hearted,” and that’s exactly right. Also, there is an inevitability here, by which we know the storm is bearing down on our family, but the end poses a fine counterpoint to the personal and national disaster we encounter. And Ms. Ward has set it up brilliantly, so that no action is inconsistent with the novel’s characters.

A reverberating, thought-provoking debut, this, with memorable characters and scenes. Take it up and marvel at an important new voice.

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"Touch" by Alexi Zentner

In Alexi Zentner’s atmospheric “Touch,” grandfather Jeannot returns to the village deep in the Canadian North woods when young Stephen nears his eleventh birthday, and begins to tell stories. Jeannot founded the village when the dog he was walking overland with got too tired to go on, and settled down to sleep. The stories he tells Stephen flow from two traditions, the tall tale and the fairy tale. They do not spare the frank and deadly detail, nor the outrageous misbehavior, nor the vengeance served cold.

Stephen’s birth comes at a time when he’s too young for World War I and too old for World War II. Thus can his grandfather have founded a boom town in the harsh and unforgiving Canadian taiga. But can the other things his grandfather tells him be true? He says he has encountered a number of evil spirits in the forest and survived them. He survived a winter in a sawmill with his pregnant wife when the snow started in mid-fall and only let up in July. What he did to survive the winter there, and the ghastly retribution flowing from it forms the crux of the story.

Mr. Zentner in his debut shows strong promise in handling the geography of the primeval forest and of the larger-than-life characters that populate this story. The fairy tale aspect is never far from the surface narrative, and pops up at unexpected times. The stories are told by the characters, whose presence we barely notice. It could be Grandpa Jeannot telling the story to Stephen, or Stephen telling the stories in turn to his daughters. All these features of the story tell of Mr. Zentner’s skill and ambition in his first novel. Both are considerable.

An atmospheric story with extreme conditions of snow, river, forest, and fire, and extreme conditions of human survival, which bring out the best and worst in the human beings and the non-human beings, “Touch” presses deeply into our memories and consciousnesses. The style is perfect for the subject matter, and suspending our disbelief rewards us generously here. Take it up if you’re ready for a good, well-told fantasy.

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"Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl

How does one plan a book like this? To set a murder mystery (we have no idea it's a murder mystery except for some prescient comments along the way, until well into the story) in a clever high schooler's senior year, and make her not only solve the mystery, but suffer abandonment as a result! This exceedingly clever piece contains multiple cultural references on every page, most of them actually valid. We have a startlingly erudite high school senior, who falls in with a clique of charismatic and clever classmates and who is able to complete her senior year without benefit of parents.

The language in this fresh, engaging piece is what propels it along. We keep turning pages because we begin to care what happens to Blue, and Hannah, the enigmatic teacher who proctors the creative group along the way. But for all the throw-away culture and kids-playing-at-adulthood, we have a deathly story underneath, in which Hannah loses her life and Blue's Dad disappears the minute Blue figures it (almost all the way) out.

Ms. Pessl amazes with her multitudinous references, her deadpan delivery, and the reality of the angst her characters feel. This is a debut you should definitely pick up, and a career we should definitely follow.

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