"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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"Wild Life" by Molly Gloss

In “Wild Life” Molly Gloss weaves the remarkable story of Charlotte Bridger Drummond in the early years of the 20th Century. Raising her sons along the Columbia River in a southern Washington state just emerging from frontier status, Mrs. Drummond embraces her husbandless state for the independence it gives her. She harbors resentment for her disappeared husband, and has never quite accepted his presumed death. It pleases her more to be left behind and put upon, than let herself don the weeds of a grieving widow.

Charlotte, willfully independent, writes adventure novels about strong, independent, young heroines, and sometimes resents the distraction of trying to raise her five sons. She has help in that area, and in the necessary housework; Melba is her live-in housekeeper and cook, and holds the accepted notions of femininity and motherhood which rule those times. When Melba’s four-year-old granddaughter goes missing at a logging camp to which her father took her, Charlotte leaves home to join the search parties. Here is when the story really takes flight.

Ms. Gloss’s early chapters display a perfect early 20th-Century language and societal attitude through the voice of a dissenter. The early chapters echo Twain throughout. However, the arch and ironical tone slowly fades as Charlotte goes to the wilderness in search of young Harriet, where the necessities of living rough and how the men cope with them come to the fore. The fantasies Charlotte has entertained about heroically finding Harriet in her first couple of days evaporate quickly as the drudgery of the actual search sets in. When Charlotte herself becomes lost in the forest, rough times become absolutely desperate. Lucky for us, Ms. Gloss has given her heroine a supply of paper and pencils so she can keep her sanity in the one way that can give her days structure and her mind her own: she writes. Such is her state that she begins to speculate which day she will die; at this extreme juncture she meets and is adopted by a family of forest primates, of an unknown species, which saves her life.

The interlude of her salvation starts a new flight of introspection in which she must reexamine her notions of family, the differences between the sexes, and the distinction between humans and animals. Ms. Gloss nails these speculations perfectly. Of course, we are forced to consider these issues alongside our heroine; the author shoves her and us toward new subtleties and a new honesty in how we look at the world. These issues are presented in a kind of multi-media format, in which the main body of the narrative is interweaved with contemporaneous news articles, excerpts written by the author before and after her adventure, and long asides about characters. The whole hangs superbly together, and displays the author’s command of news and attitudes, scientific knowledge and thought of the day. More important, however, Ms. Gloss gives us the inward journey of a real human heroine, through harrowing adventure, and the even greater challenge of a changed and refocused heart. The author gives us a remarkable, truly moving work in “Wild Life,” and I urge you to take it up.

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"The Train of Small Mercies" by David Rowell

On a sweltering June day in 1968 a New York Central Railroad train traveled from New York to Washington carrying the casket containing the remains of New York’s recently assassinated senator, Bobby Kennedy. The train ran slowly and behind schedule, because of tragic accidents in New Jersey, and we learn of this in David Rowell’s remarkable and clever debut, “The Train of Small Mercies,” but this serves as backbone and binding arc to the vivid stories of a small but diverse group of ordinary Americans in the throes of living their own lives.

We glimpse these lives perfectly through Mr. Rowell’s versatile and energetic treatment. There is the young civil servant who has installed a pool in his back yard as a way of capturing some magic he feels must be fading from his life. We read of the fifth-grade boy recently returned to his home after being kidnapped by his father. A mother suffers when her daughter is injured in a fall; a clever and attractive would-be nanny assumes her interview with the Kennedy clan will not proceed; and the newly-hired NY Central porter spends his first day on the job on the funeral train; and perhaps most pointedly, a very young Vietnam veteran, just having returned home, must try to adjust to life after losing a leg in combat.

It’s hard to imagine a better cast to present this crystal-clear cross-section of America at that moment. Mr. Rowell takes on and very beautifully handles each of these diverse characters – their outlook and opinion, their strivings, their day-to-day concerns. There is just the right balance here of the timeless – two parents fretting over their injured daughter in the hospital – and the period-specific – the despair felt by blacks and other idealists in the face of the out-of-control violence in America, reeling from a third assassination in four-plus years, and the second in just a few months.

This is a balanced, mature work of fiction, which always takes me by surprise in a debut piece, somehow. Mr. Rowell snaps his shutter on a set of fictional events bound together by the Kennedy funeral train, and then steps back. He offers no solutions; each narrative is left almost as arbitrarily as it is taken up, and this strikes me as exactly correct. Mr. Kennedy, a hero only slightly less important to blacks than Reverend King, was killed before truly accomplishing any of the goals he had promised to his constituency, and the lives of mourning supporters and opponents alike are no less open-ended in our open-ended United States. I wonder if Mr. Rowell means the title in an ironic sense – not every set of characters enjoys a merciful turn in these events – they’re the minority, in fact. But running through each narrative is the thread of the redemption that people expected could come of Senator Kennedy’s efforts. And therein lie some of the yearned-for mercies. And certain of the characters simply hope their lives will benefit in more prosaic ways, and it is a very clear measure of Mr. Rowell’s success that we share the hopes right alongside them.

The author has provided a very apt and accurate portrait of America at a singular time, and in the process, has blessed us with an equally singular debut novel.

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"Call Me When You Land" by Michael Schiavone

Katie Olmstead deals with family issues throughout “Call Me When You Land,” and they threaten to grind her up. Our portrait of this almost-forty Massachusetts single mom is so close, I checked after finishing the book to see whether I was remembering it wrong – but no, it’s written in the third person, but the point of view is so Katie-centric that it has the feel of a first-person narrative.

The first event we encounter in this narrative is the far-off death of Katie’s son’s father, an event that shakes Katie and her son CJ. Something about this event also rattles the already-threadbare bond between mother and son, and drives Katie deeper into the bottle. In fact, Katie imbibes alcohol from the first page onward in this book, a habit that author Michael Schiavone very effectively shows to be quite alarming. CJ acts out on the hockey rink where Katie can witness it, and probably in other places where she can’t. Drink reduces Katie’s inhibitions and she drags a former boyfriend back to bed for incautious and self-absorbed gratification. Throughout, Katie drinks and drinks, and then drinks some more, and then drinks because her hangover is so bad.

Katie’s cluelessness and denial in the face of all the male characters cannot ultimately eclipse the gleaming, monstrous Harley Davidson Road King motorcycle which CJ’s father bequeaths to him. This ticket to ride, that CJ’s biological father leaves for his son, wonderfully encapsulates the idea that CJ can get away to a place where he can finally become the focus of his mother’s attention. And Katie’s reaction to CJ’s flight is one of the true keys of this well-told novel – a non-act that forms the heart of the action and sets Katie’s spiral on a more hopeful course.

Katie’s character wore me down for much of this story, I’ll be honest. I’m definitely glad I stuck with her, though, and with this debut novel of Mr. Schiavone’s. What he sets out to do, he does with style and depth. He’s definitely at one with telling the human story, and I do hope it’s a territory he explores again very soon, and very often.

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"Bones Beneath Our Feet" by Michael Schein

As a teacher of history and expert in the past of the Seattle area, Michael Schein is eminently qualified to write about the “pacification” and settling of Washington Territory. “Bones Beneath Our Feet” proves this.

As in any ambitious historical novel, “Bones Beneath Our Feet” is set just as epochal changes occur, in this case, in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We get sketchy biographical data on the principal players (who are also historical figures), like the rapacious and indomitable first governor of the territory, Isaac Stevens, and his main antagonist, Leschi of the Nisqually. Detail abounds in this straight-line narrative, as the author uses the omniscient viewpoint to unfold the series of skirmishes, murders, arson, aggressive criminality, and treachery that marked the conflict. Certain features of this history are quite predictable: aboriginal natives who chronically underestimate the threat, and who behave in such a way as to inadvertently maximize it; prejudiced white settlers, who unfailingly believe God is on their side, and are quite comfortable with the idea of annihilating the natives; unbounded greed and ambition of early settlers and politicians.

The book, while not overly long, nevertheless seems ponderous. It bends and groans under the weight of the detail, unfortunately, and Mr. Schein could comfortably have glossed over perhaps a third of what he presents, in favor of a little more depth in the characters. I grant that this was not his design; I have no doubt that readers can rely very confidently on this book to present the facts of the matter, but I don’t think it succeeds as a real historical fiction.

It does, however, succeed in capturing the natural grandeur of the unspoiled Puget Sound – the climate is represented vividly – and the author wrings out the inexorable sinking despair that overcomes the defeated Leschi, quite effectively.

Mr. Schein attempts a historical novel, but what emerges are loosely-connected historical tableaux set to dialog. Many battles and skirmishes are effectively and graphically done, but the whole does not hang together very well. I sense clearly the author’s intense commitment to the history, but not his craft for drawing out a true fiction from it.

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"Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese

When you look at Abraham Verghese’s work load and background, you wonder how he could find the time to write a novel. And when the novel turns out to be “Cutting for Stone,” a gripping, larger-than-life family epic, all you can do is sit back in wonder. I do that a lot when I read, particularly when I encounter accomplishments as impressive as this.

What makes “Cutting for Stone” impressive? Dr. Verghese establishes an unspoken, doomed love between a highly skilled surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone, and a young Carmelite nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Having begun treks in very different circumstances, from very different places, they fall together at a Catholic hospital in Addis Ababa. The love they find is obviously forbidden to both, but Dr. Stone succumbs from time to time to breakdowns, physical and psychological episodes in which he suffers horribly, and from which he emerges with no memory. One of these episodes, during which he is nursed as always by Sister, results in Sister Mary Joseph Praise’s pregnancy. The episode of the birth of the twins Marion and Shiva harrows and frightens us as it completely changes the lives of all involved.

As events flow in the wake of this epochal event, through the thirty-or-so years, Dr. Verghese unfolds for his rapt readers the dramas of betrayal, prejudice, treason, civil war, and death, all from the adoptive family of the twins, caring for the various sick and suffering at the Ethiopian hospital. A prominent teaching physician himself, Dr. Verghese achieves his noblest effect by using detailed medical knowledge as part of the plot, to set up the unforgettable act of sacrifice that forms the climax.

How to describe this work: balanced, epic, sophisticated, heartbreaking, engaging, wise in its observations of human nature. I highly recommend this; it will thoroughly transport you.

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PSA: "Housekeeping" Essay Revised

This time I endeavored to have an actual conslusion. I apologize to all who worked their way through it only to find that it lacked one.

This, among other activities, have slowed the pace of regular book reviews.

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"Partitions" by Amit Majmudar

British India was divided into India and the two Pakistans upon gaining its independence in 1947. Systemic violence accompanied Partition, as the division was called, as groups perpetrated all manner of crime against each other. “Partitions,” the debut novel of Amit Majmudar, contains for us a close-up view of the horror, and adds a layer to our understanding (or to mine, at least): it wasn’t only Muslim vs. Hindu – there was a third substantial group fighting for its independence and identity, the Sikhs.

Each of these groups is represented by Mr. Majmudar’s fateful quartet: the riots force Dr. Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim physician in the Punjab city of Amritsar, into the flood of refugees heading for the new Pakistan. Simram Kaur is a fifteen-year-old Sikh girl whose family tries to drug and then kill her rather than let her be defiled by a non-believer. And the heart-breaking little Hindu twins, Shankar and Keshav, get separated from their mother in a crowded railway station. Mr. Majmudar uses an elegant device to bring the four together and keep them that way: the spirit of the boys’ dead father watches over the four and tries in his nearly helpless way to keep them safe, because he knows they need each other.

It takes the four nearly the entire book to meet up; each endures numerous close scrapes where any one of them could have wound up dead or worse. Dr. Jaitly, the twins’ deceased father, urges the quartet onward in his if-wishes-were-horses way, and we suffer and hope along with him. Dr. Masud is the saintly, stuttering, indefatigable center of this inchoate family: he suffers injury and dehydration without complaint, treats every case of sickness and injury that comes his way and there are many in the swelling tide of Muslim refugees. He attracts a battalion of orphan boys and stray dogs to help him on his way and keep him safe. Of all the partitions implicitly or explicitly built up in the narrative – ethnic, religious, social, moral – it’s clear Mr. Majmudar is an equal-opportunity admirer of courage and generosity. By completely ignoring the partitions everyone else seems to require, these final four are a microcosm of the possibility of love and hope.

Mr. Majmudar has crafted a touching, suspenseful, uplifting, gratifying story. This is another reason I love reading debut novels so much. We meet another highly capable practitioner, with a wise heart and a real gift for unfolding a beautiful story.

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"Words Made Fresh" by Larry Woiwode

Larry Woiwode bestows on us ten thoughtful and fearless essays in “Words Made Fresh.” He tackles subjects as disparate as education, faith, the role of place in artistic inspiration, John Updike, William Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan. And throughout, he poses questions and conundrums, expresses doubt and hope, and passes judgment in a graceful, even-handed way.

Right out of the box he gives us a hint of the depth and unblinking earnestness we will encounter in each piece. In “Guns & Peace: An American Icon,” we find a startlingly frank questioning of his own motives when attending to a mercy killing of a deer after an automobile accident. The physical description of the landscape and his perception of it is stark and memorable – perfect. In “Homeplace, Heaven or Hell: On the Order of Existence” he launches a theme to which he returns again and again in other essays: the role of the childhood home in the creative process. He handily debunks the big-city critics and guardians of orthodoxy who would label a writer from the hinterlands as “regional,” which when they use it is nothing but pejorative. He flips the table over on them, saying not only is region and homeland important in the creative process, but an accurate and faithful attachment to it is a prerequisite part of any great art. He applies this principle in turn to such diverse writers as John Gardner, John Updike, and Shakespeare.

Mr. Woiwode holds with John Gardner that true fiction must have a moral element, that the author’s intent regarding the moral issues propounded must be clear and that lessons and ideas flowing from the action must point in the right moral direction. Mr. Woiwode several times avers his service to Scripture, and always admits that this places him far outside the mainstream of academia. Well, not outside the mainstream, diametrically opposed to it. I am aware of the “on the outs” status of Christianity in current “correct” thought; Mr. Woiwode, while staking his ground squarely and usually straightforwardly, fails in main to acknowledge the cynical and exclusionary way in which the vast community of honest, self-avowed Christians of the U.S. were hoodwinked into supporting illegal and immoral schemes hatched by administrations enjoying their very support.

The long, elegiac piece on Updike (“Updike’s Sheltered Self: On America’s Maestro”) deserves a broad audience. Written to the highest standard of critical essays, this comprehensive appreciation gave me more pause and more food for thought than anything I have read, ever, on Updike. Unified, persuasive, well-paced, even-handed, this is the main attraction of this collection. The treatment of Gardner’s “Mickelsson’s Ghosts” is an outstanding example of what I aspire to on the “Deeper Appreciations” pages. (It embarrasses me for you to look at them now. I am substantially re-writing the “Housekeeping” essay – and hope to fashion an actual conclusion for it.) I need to get to that piece and see what Mr. Woiwode’s fussing about.

Enlightening, thought-provoking, well-written in the extreme, Mr. Woiwode does himself, his faith, and his craft proud. This is an important collection for anyone interested in today’s literature, thought, education, or culture. It’s only too bad Mr. Woiwode’s faith puts him in the wilderness of “incorrectness.”

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"The Redemption of George Baxter Henry" by Conor Bowman

George Baxter Henry is GBH, and he makes a joke out of having the same initials as “grievous bodily harm.” There’s really not much risk of that when you pick up this breezy, off-hand little tome, unless you injure yourself one of the times you throw your head back and laugh out loud. Because you will do that certainly, if you’re anything like me. You might not find the same things funny, but there’s more than enough to tickle everyone’s fancy.

The wisecracks start early and don’t let up. George Baxter Henry, fifty-one-year-old commercial lawyer and his fractured family are traveling to France from Boston for a holiday to see if George’s marriage can be saved. He also has to deal with his coke-addled rock star son and his hateful, vituperative mother-in-law. Along the way he sheds one paramour for another, more exotic, French one. You wind up wanting GBH to come out on top because of how involved he gets with his son and what how he quietly stays out of his daughter’s way. Through some underhanded tricks and some careful research and a climactic confrontation, George Baxter Henry squeaks through.

This is a moderately enjoyable bit of fluff, touching on some serious life issues, but never getting heavy-handed about them. At least George really learns what’s important by the end of the book.

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