Salvage the Bones

This is a beautifully written novel by Jessamyn Ward centering on an impoverished, struggling family living in a hardscrabble bayou town along the coast of Mississippi during the twelve days leading up to and including the direct landfall of Hurricane Katrina.   Their story is told through the eyes of Esch, a 15 year-old girl living with her three brothers and alcoholic father.  


Mama died giving birth to Esch's younger brother, Junior.  While Esch and her two older brothers, Randall and Skeetah, can recall their mother, her words and actions still alive for them, Junior is truly an orphan, depending on Esch and his big brothers to love and care for him. 


The plot of land the family lives on has come to be called the Pit.  It was purchased by their grandfather, who also built the first home on the property.  Esch's grandparents are long-dead and the house they left behind "is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years."  Before dying, Papa Joseph had helped Daddy build a new house which Esch's family occupies and once he and Mother Elizabeth were gone, Mama and the older children had slowly over the years taken "couch by chair by picture by dish, until there was nothing left."  


This is a family in severe decline, living in poverty, salvaging what they can from the land, neighbors,  abandoned houses and each other, occasionally stealing (but struggling with what Mama would think of that behavior).  Daddy works odd jobs when he can pull it together; he cares deeply for his children and is grief-stricken by the loss of his wife. But alcohol has its grips on him and he has been failing to provide for his family since Mama's death.  


Although the framework of the novel is provided by the approaching hurricane, it's almost a sidebar to the everyday starving, fighting, and struggling to survive.  There are also instances of great love and sacrifice.  Within a few pages of the novel's opening, we learn Esch is pregnant and that, as a matter of fact, she has been sexually active since she was twelve with a number of her brothers' friends.  This is part of her life, part of her survival.  She will deal with it and survive, as will the baby.  Esch is reading, as part of her summer reading assignment, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and throughout Salvage the Bones she reflects on the elementary similarities between the ancient gods and goddesses and the world she lives in.  Spurned by the father of her child whom she loves with the ferociousness of a fifteen year old, she thinks "In every one of the Greeks' tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman or a woman chasing a man.  There is never a meeting in the middle.  There is only a body in a ditch and one person walking toward or away from it."  


One of the few comforting aspects of the story is that Esch and her brothers love one another deeply.  They comfort and look out for each other.  Esch is especially close to her brother Skeetah, who has developed an intense relationship with a white pit bull he has named China.  China gives birth to a litter of puppies at the opening of the novel and Skeetah's efforts to keep China and the puppies alive and healthy are monumental.  It's a complicated relationship fraught with love and violence; China is a "fighting dog".  Skeetah has trained her to be a killer.  The violence and of the dog-fighting scene is almost too hard to read; too real, too bloody, too intense.  


On Day 11 in the novel,  Katrina hits.   This isn't a spoiler; it's clear from the first page that this is going to occur.  What the reader can't guess is how or whether the family will survive intact.


I found Salvage the Bones to be totally engrossing.  I've read other novels related to Katrina (most memorably Zeitoun by Dave Eggers), but this was the first one not centered in New Orleans.  The author's account of lives lived in the impoverished underbelly of our country is moving and certainly has the ring of authenticity.  It speaks in a matter-of-fact, memorable way, of life for the have-nots, and it reminds me of how convenient it is to forget about them in our day-to-day lives.  


We are a country of sharply divided economies and cultures; I appreciate the opportunity a finely-written novel gives me to deepen my understanding of our country and the challenges it faces. I have to, and want to, use this knowledge to inform my politics, my behaviors, and my view of the future.  


Read Salvage the Bones; you won't easily forget it.   

The Leftovers

Remember about a year ago when there was a lot of press about the “End Times” and something called the “Rapture” was predicted to occur on May 21, 2011, and then when that failed to materialize (or de-materialize??), the prediction was changed to October  (also a bust)?

Tom Perrotta’s new novel The Leftovers, is a riff on the never-ending song of Doomsdayers (is that a word??).  In the prologue, we learn that “something tragic has occurred…a Rapture-like phenomenon, but it doesn’t appear to have been the Rapture.”  Millions of people all over the world have simply vanished into thin air, and the cause is “unknown” according to official government reports.  Those arguing most loudly against this phenomenon being labeled the Rapture are Christians because, “as far as anyone can tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn’t be was random.  The whole point was to separate the wheat from the chaff, to reward the true believers and put the rest of the world on notice.  An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.”  After all, one couldn’t help noticing that many “bad” people had been taken and many “good” people left behind: “the leftovers”.  How very disconcerting.

The story opens three years after the Sudden Departure (as it has come to be commonly referred to) has taken place.  No explanation or reason behind the phenomenon has become known or commonly held.  The author is not particularly interested in that aspect of the story. Instead, he takes us into the lovely suburban town of Mapleton and focuses our attention on one family who has survived the Sudden Departure physically intact, but emotionally and psychically damaged; who wouldn’t be?

Through these family members we get a very good sense of what the world is like post-Sudden Departure.  Each member of the Garvey family – Kevin (who has just recently become Mayor of Mapleton), Laurie (a happily, or so she thought, stay-at-home mom) and their children, Tom and Jill.
The family has taken some serious “hits” in the three years since the SD, and the novel recounts these events to bring us up to speed.  Kevin, who had retired early after selling a successful business, has been elected Mayor of Mapleton as the candidate of the “Hopeful Party.”  He epitomizes the “keep on keepin’on” guy; he yearns for everything to return to normal and works hard at it, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Laurie has left her family to join the Guilty Remnant Cult, a chain-smoking, silent cult of “watchers” who stalk the survivors reminding them that their days are most likely numbered.  Tom has dropped out of college and also joined a cult, the Holy Waynes, who “heal through hugging” and daughter Jill who alone has stayed with Kevin, struggles mightily to maintain some sense of understanding.  Jill is a Witness, someone who was with a person who vanished in the Sudden Departure and, as if that isn’t enough, has been abandoned by her mom, Laurie.

Other characters, like the Reverend Jamison who is mentally crushed at the unfairness of “missing the cut” and being left behind and Nora, who lost her entire family to the Sudden Departure, add additional dimensions to this very rich, very affecting novel.  Through these very different characters and their stories, we get a sense of just what a post-Rapture world might be actually be like.

The meaning of the title is obvious, of course; the leftovers are the folks who weren’t among the vanished, and yet, I think Perrotta takes its meaning to other levels within the novel.  At one point, Nora is thinking “We just had turkey for Thanksgiving and the leftovers last forever. It’s like, enough with the turkey already.”   I think Perrotta is talking about more than turkey here.  The weariness of the leftovers, the emotional pain, the drudgery of putting one foot in front of the other, the exertion of pretending must be exhausting; “enough with the turkey already”.

Perrotta also refers to leftover memories and the sadness/happiness associated with them.  And the terrifying void when they begin to fade; how does one deal with that empty space where someone’s face used to reside?

Not to say The Leftovers doesn’t include glimpses of hope; it does.  That glimmer of hope makes us care about what happens to the characters; we get a sense that maybe, just maybe, there are just enough leftovers to put the world back together again very, very slowly. 

1Q84

I’ve just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s latest novel: 1Q84.  Actually, I finished reading it two days ago and have spent the intervening time just thinking about it and whether or not it lived up to my expectations. 


Before getting to that, however, a little bit about Murakami.  He is a highly-thought of Japanese novelist who has written many novels and short-stories, not all of them available in English.  He has many fans among literary critics, but some detractors as well.The English translation of his “break-through” novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was published in the US in 1997.  I read and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Like 1Q84, the story has fantastical elements and requires the reader to “go with it.”  Personally, I like touches of supernaturalism or “magic” in stories; not outright fantasies, but just enough other-worldly occurrences to keep it interesting. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was original and sometimes seemed needlessly complicated, but I liked the twists and turns and the resolution.If you like to read dialogue and action-driven, cleanly plotted novels, Murakami is not for you!  What I find and enjoy about Murakami is his deft hand at introspection.  He spends quite a bit of time and many, many pages sharing his characters’ thoughts , motivations, and most trivial behaviors.  But the reader comes across many small gems as a result of this thoughtful writing; I often want to make a note of a particularly well-written statement but don’t want to stop reading and of course then forget to go back and do so.  But there is one I jotted down when reading Chronicle that has stuck with me: “Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.”  Just take a moment to think about that; it seems dangerously true to me and jumps uninvited into my head when I’m watching a TV show that I am deeply regretting.  It struck a (depressing) chord and I thought went nicely with my official FB quotation “Such contortions fatigue us” which I think I actually read in a Miss Manners column.


But I digress.  A few years ago, I read a review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the New York Times that stated Murakami does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes.  As I was reading his latest novel, 1Q84, I often felt that might be true of this endeavor as well.


1Q84 (the title is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the year 1984; the letter Q and the number 9 are homophones in Japanese) takes place in 1984 and is obviously a homage to Orwell’s novel.  It focuses primarily on the story of Aomame and Tengo, a man and a woman who through various twists and turns find themselves living in an alternate reality, that is very similar to their usual Tokyo environment but with subtle (the policemen carry different weapons) and not-so subtle (the alternate Tokyo has two moons appearing in the sky) differences. The narrative shifts back and forth between the characters Tengo and Aomame and it becomes clear as the novel progresses (thorough almost 1000 pages) that they share many connections and as a matter of fact share a deep love for each other.  The complicated story involves cult religion, murder, love, family, Japanese culture and elements of fantasy, as I mentioned earlier.  Murakami is an astute observer of people and while the extreme detail can tend to bog the story down, I still enjoyed many of his observations and plot turns.


The writing has been criticized for being redundant and I have to agree with that.  Murakami seemed to feel the need to repeat many of the story elements several times; it made me wonder if he was doubtful of his skills as writer keeping control of the many paths the story took or our skills as readers in following those paths.  I found it also weird that often these redundancies were in BOLD print; ok, I get it!!!  Ironically, one of the observations the author made that impressed me is “if you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”   That made me stop and think:  I don't think this applies to seventh grade math, for example.  Often, explanation does lead to a "lightbulb" moment and understanding follows.  But I think Murakami is talking about understanding something on an emotional level; that type of understanding that occurs when a good friend is telling you how she feels about someone or some event that has caused great happiness or great sadness and you can truthfully say "I know; I get exactly what you mean. No explanation needed."  I feel that Murakami is a gifted writer and does present the reader with enough emotional insights into his characters to allow this type of understanding.  His belaboring of some elements in the story was distracting.


So…did the novel meet my expectations of a magnum opus, as 1Q84 was touted to be in Japan by some critics?  I would have to say no, but my expectations were very high.  I expected to be totally swept into another world and to love every minute of it.  Ultimately, there were too many unanswered questions about the Little People, the Dowager, the seventeen year old dyslexic author, the fate of the cult, and the search for a new Leader to “hear the voices.”  (No spoilers here!!!)  It was a rather “small” ending for such a complicated story.  It didn’t have the satisfying resolution of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I missed that.  But I admire Murakami’s imagination and chutzpah; I love original stories and this one ranked highly in that arena.