It used to be Faulkner. Now, if you're a young Mississippi author writing about poor rural characters, you expect comparisons to Larry Brown.
As in Brown's fiction, set in the rural north Mississippi hill country, we have never read about the characters in Jesmyn Ward's new novel, Salvage the Bones. These are poor African-Americans on the Gulf Coast. It is a story about family, poignantly told with heart and humor, told with a hard honesty that stands out among modern Southern fiction.
Set in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, days before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the Coast, this is a different kind of survival story. Truthfully, we weren't looking forward to another Katrina story. But every time we think we've had our fill, along comes something fresh and exhilarating like Skip Horack's The Southern Cross and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun to correct our attitude. And much like the famous storm, Salvage the Bones packed a bigger punch than expected.
Esch, a fourteen-year-old girl, and her three brothers watch as their hard-drinking but loving father prepares for the approaching hurricane and find that they must fend for themselves as his fervor increases daily. Each of the siblings is struggling with their own survival in other ways. Esch's middle brother Skeetah continues to steal food for his prize-fighting pit bull, and her younger brother, Junior, follows Randall, the oldest of the clan, as he tries to step in for his occupied father. Esch harbors her own shocking secret, which colors her perception over the novel's tense course.
The more we read and became entranced by the world that Jesmyn Ward has created, we began to think less Larry Brown and more Faulkner. Could this be a kind of modern-day As I Lay Dying, a story that looks intently at each individual member of a motherless family, but rather than marching toward their destiny, their destiny comes hurtling toward them?
Whatever it is, Ward's Salvage the Bones is powerful and essential reading for anyone who keeps up with the state of Mississippi literature. Or Southern literature for that matter, and even American literature, since we were glad to hear that the novel has been nominated for the National Book Award, which will be announced November 16.
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