Salvage the Bones.

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones was one of my birthday presents this year, and I just got through reading it. If you want the plot laid out, you can read the Wikipedia entry or Parul Sehgal’s NY Times review (archived). Me, I don’t read books for plot, and all I can tell you is that the novel’s architecture and its prose are perfectly fitted to the story being told; I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs, and if you like them you will certainly like the novel:

My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth, and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all. It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond, and then Papa Joseph thought the earth would give under the water, that the pond would spread and gobble up the property and make it a swamp, so he stopped selling earth for money. He died soon after from mouth cancer, or at least that’s what Mother Lizbeth used to tell us when we were little. She always talked to us like grown-ups, cussed us like grown-ups. She died in her sleep after praying the rosary, when she was in her seventies, and two years later, Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. Since it’s just us and Daddy here now with China, the chickens, and a pig when Daddy can afford one, the fields Papa Joseph used to plant around the Pit are overgrown with shrubs, with saw palmetto, with pine trees reaching up like the bristles on a brush.

[…]

Mama taught me how to find eggs; I followed her around the yard. It was never clean. Even when she was alive, it was full of empty cars with their hoods open, the engines stripped, and the bodies sitting there like picked-over animal bones. We only had around ten hens then. Now we have around twenty-five or thirty because we can’t find all the eggs; the hens hide them well. I can’t remember exactly how I followed Mama because her skin was dark as the reaching oak trees, and she never wore bright colors: no fingernail pink, no forsythia blue, no banana yellow. Maybe she bought her shirts and pants bright and they faded with wear so that it seemed she always wore olive and black and nut brown, so that when she bent to pry an egg from a hidden nest, I could hardly see her, and she moved and it looked like the woods moved, like a wind was running past the trees. So I followed behind her by touch, not by sight, my hand tugging at her pants, her skirt, and that’s how we walked in the room made by the oaks, looking for eggs. I like looking for eggs. I can wander off by myself, move as slow as I want, stare at nothing. Ignore Daddy and Junior. Feel like the quiet and the wind. I imagine Mama walking in front of me, turning to smile or whistle at me to get me to walk faster, her teeth white in the gloom. But still, it is work, and I have to pull myself back and concentrate to find anything to eat.

The young narrator, Esch, is a reader, and she is currently absorbed in Greek myth, the Medea story in particular; it is used not for precious parallels but for salutary jolts. And one linguistic point: when I came to a mention of Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, of course I wanted to know how “Buras” was pronounced (anyone who presumes anything about Louisiana place names is a fool — case in point, Natchitoches (/ˈnækətəʃ/). Since the Wikipedia article didn’t tell me, I had to trawl through a number of videos to be sure that the locals say /ˈbjurəs/ (BYOO-rəs), and since I can’t find that corroborated in a printed source that will satisfy the Korinthenkacker at Wikipedia and thus can’t add it to the article, I’m sharing it here. (I did find a video of a woman teaching viewers how to pronounce some of the more opaque Louisiana place names by first parading the wrong versions, often more than once, before triumphantly producing the correct one. Apparently she has no idea that what that does is hammer the wrong forms into your head; when she says “I hear people say X, X, X, X, X, when actually it’s Y!” you’re not going to come away with anything but X. Bah.)