The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel
My rating: 4/5 cats
”That’s the ending of the story,” he said. “Something broken.”
this is a darkly satisfying southern gothic tale of what transpired when a lawyer named autopsy bliss invited the devil to the small town of breathed, ohio in 1984.
the problem with extending an invitation to the devil is that he might just accept. and he might not turn out to be the worst thing living in your town.
i’d heard nothing but great things about this book here on goodreads, and i’d been wanting to read it for ages, but had been TRYING not to buy hardcovers because i am oh-so-poor. so when i was offered a copy by the author, it was like all the book angels answering my book-prayers.
as it turned out, the delay was a blessing, and the timing could not have been better – nothing beats finishing a book taking place during a horrible heat wave on the day a blizzard hits, and i loved every sweaty bit of this.
the story itself is fantastic, but the getting there might not be for all readers. much like one of my favorite books, The Book of Night Women, in order to appreciate this story to its fullest, you have to completely give yourself over to it. with night women, it’s a dialect thing – you cannot, as a reader, balk at the unfamiliar slang or cadence or you will struggle. with this one, it’s more stylistic – you have to embrace the florid, rollicking prose that is the vehicle for her storytelling and just go with it, or it’ll quicksand you.
the character names are bananas (in a good way), and the writing is overblown and turgid as hell (in a mostly good way). her style is completely her own, and like many debuts, her prose occasionally gets away from her, but when it succeeds – and it succeeds more often than not – it is the perfect way to tell this tale; its words swelling and running rampant in the humidity; the ribbons in a woman’s hair indulgently described:
The way they wove, they could sometimes look like slithering in an undergrowth. It was as if she were the infected Eden, the snake still turning through Eve..
the less-successful flipside to this indulgence are the few instances written more for the reader’s benefit than what would be natural for the characters. for example:
”How do you say this place?” he asked.
“Whatcha mean?”
“I mean, the name of the town. How do you say it?”
“Oh, well, most folks think it’s pronounced like the past tense of breathin’. You know, like you just breathed somethin’ in. But it’s not like that at all. Say breath. and then ed. Breath-ed. Say it so the tongue don’t recognize such a large break between Breath and ed. Breathed.”
is that how a thirteen-year-old boy would answer a simple freaking question? probably not, but you’re in this world, with these characters and my advice to you is to go. with. it.
because it’s worth it, for all the beautifully-written parts like this:
”…the thing about breaking something that no one much thinks about is that more shadows are created. The bowl when intact was one shadow. One single shadow. Now each piece will have a shadow of its own. My God, so many shadows have been made. Small little slivers of darkness that seem at once to be larger than the bowl ever was. That’s the problem of broken things. The light dies in small ways, and the shadows – well, they always win big in the end.”
each chapter opens with a fragment of milton’s Paradise Lost, the original apologist for the devil. and the devil who ultimately answers autopsy’s invitation comes in the shape of a thirteen-year-old green-eyed black boy named sal, who befriends autopsy’s son fielding and is one of the most sympathetic characters in this town of breathed. (that’s ‘breath-ed’, folks)
if the the problem with extending an invitation to the devil is that he might just accept, the problem with a sympathetic devil is one of accountability – if the devil is a likable little boy, he becomes less useful as a scapegoat for that brand of “the devil made me do it” washing-off of personal responsibility, and the evils of the world are revealed to be either directly due to human failings or unfortunate accidents that often result from these failings: fear, prejudice, misunderstandings, pain, revenge.
not that everyone will see it that way – the scapegoat is a very tempting place to lay the blame, and no one wants to confront the uncomfortable realization that evil was already simmering in the town before the devil showed up. and there’s evil aplenty, from relatively small transgressions like infidelity to much, much bigger ones.
it’s a dark book told in a beautiful way – split between the events of that summer and the adult life of fielding bliss in the years following. the 1984 parts are wonderful – sad and chewy and wrapped up admirably. the reveal of the significance of sal’s birthday gift to fielding’s mother stella is a heartbreaker, and the ice cream reveal even more so. and granny… dear lord, granny… there’s less resolution to the adult fielding’s story, which was a little disappointing, but the quote i opened the review with kinda sums it all up:
”That’s the ending of the story,” he said. “Something broken.”
a fantastic debut and i want more…
