Surviving Katrina
By PARUL SEHGAL
SALVAGE THE
BONES
By Jesmyn Ward
261 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.
Job has nothing on
15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead,
Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that
has ever come easily to her. When the boys used to take her down in the dirt or
in the back seats of stripped cars in her front yard, she could escape briefly,
pretend to be Psyche, Eurydice, Daphne, her favorite nymphs and goddesses from
the Greek myths. But Manny, the boy who put the baby inside her, won’t look at
her anymore. Esch can’t lie down in the dirt and pretend to be someone else or
anywhere else. She’s stuck in shabby Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black
Mississippi bayou town in the direct path of a hurricane they’re calling
Katrina.
“Salvage the Bones,” the
2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is a taut, wily novel, smartly
plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an
ancient, archetypal tale. Think of Noah or Gilgamesh or any soggy group of
humans and dogs huddled together, waiting out an apocalyptic act of God or
weather. It’s an old story — of family honor, revenge, disaster — and it’s a good
one. As Arnold Schoenberg said, “There is still much good music that can be
written in C major.” And Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with
her reader’s expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness.
When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood.
Best of all, she gives us a
singular heroine who breaks the mold of the typical teenage female protagonist.
Esch isn’t plucky or tomboyish. She’s squat, sulky and sexual. But she is
beloved — her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior are fine and strong; they
brawl and sacrifice and steal for her and each other. And Esch is in bloom. Her
love for Manny and her love for literature have animated the world; everything
is suddenly swollen and significant. “He makes my heart beat like that, I
want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts.” The headiness of
the language is the book’s major strength and flaw. Ward can get carried away.
She never uses one metaphor when she can use three, and too many sentences grow
waterlogged and buckle.
Set in the 12 days leading
up to and just after Hurricane Katrina, the novel presents each day as a
distinct vignette with the punch of a story. The book opens with China,
Skeetah’s pit bull, splitting open in the shed, birthing her first litter while
the family watches and Skeetah massages her hips. And every ensuing scene riffs
on these themes: the tenderness of men, the blessings that are brothers, the
nearness of death. As a through-line, Ward weaves in the classics. Esch’s love
of the Greek myths has inoculated her not from horror but from surprise. When
Manny spurns her, she is ready: “In every one of the Greeks’ mythology 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.” She already knows that nature is protean and
mischievous, that the gods tumble to earth to chase mortal women, girls can
turn into trees, a hurricane can laugh, and the creek will rise out of its bed
and wend its way into her house “to eat and play.”
For all its fantastical
underpinnings, “Salvage the Bones” is never wrong when it comes to suffering.
Sorrow and pain aren’t presented as especially ennobling. They exist to be
endured — until the next Katrina arrives to “cut us to the bone.” And like
every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how
to wait out the storm and swim to safety.
Parul Sehgal is books editor at NPR.org.
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