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. 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. She never uses one metaphor when she can use three, and too many sentences grow waterlogged and buckle. “ 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. Her love for Manny and her love for literature have animated the world everything is suddenly swollen and significant.
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. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood.īest of all, she gives us a singular heroine who breaks the mold of the typical teenage female protagonist. 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.
It’s an old story - of family honor, revenge, disaster - and it’s a good one. 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 feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale. “Salvage the Bones,” the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. She’s stuck in shabby Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black Mississippi bayou town in the direct path of a hurricane they’re calling Katrina. Esch can’t lie down in the dirt and pretend to be someone else or anywhere else.
But Manny, the boy who put the baby inside her, won’t look at her anymore. 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. Sex is the only thing that has ever come easily to her. Mama’s dead, Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night.
She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky.
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