Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky by David Connerley Nahm
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a lyrical and nonlinear little punch of a book which concerns itself with the life and memories of a woman named leah who runs a nonprofit for low-income women who are victims of domestic abuse. leah’s younger brother jacob went missing when he was only five years old, and the mystery of his disappearance has haunted her for her entire life, until the day a man claiming to be jacob appears in her office. what happens next for leah is interspersed with the stories of the women who come to her for help at the nonprofit, overheard conversations, her mother’s stories and parenting fears, snippets of playground conversations, memories of leering boys and failed relationships, ghost stories, the dark half-understood tales of sex and death snapped like gum in the half light of evening. and it goes a little something like this:
Without the bonds of school, they pour out of doors, unable to be constrained. The classroom is a coffin and the bedroom is a coffin and even their own bodies are coffins and they must escape. They climb fences and cross cow pastures in cawing gaggles, boys and girls panting, and in strings they follow the stream’s muddy edges and climb embankments, passing green glass bottles half-entombed in dried mud, old newspapers with ruined words that may have once described some terrible tragedy, ripped clothes left to the rain in the tangle of a tree’s old roots, and abandoned cars with trees growing through them. They follow thin tributaries off into dark bowers of bent branches and debris left by last summer’s young. Boys look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of boys who look at the bare legs of boys and so forth in the warm shade of dark green leaves. A shoe and a pair of underpants caught on a rock in the water as the current improvises eddies.
this reads like a more poetic megan abbott—it’s about all those slices of childhood and adolescence which are carved in the space away from adults. all the secrets and selftimes girls spend teetering on the edge of the adult world, with the allure of older boys—their throats full of laughter like a skull full of honey.
he’s great writing about childhood cruelty and regret—the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of sexual opportunity.
By the gate to get onto the ride, boys in pegged jeans and sleeveless t-shirts spat onto the straw covered ground. “Wanna come with us?” one asked as the others stalked and hunched in the glitter of the ride’s light, but Leah declined, unnerved by the boys’ open stares, by the boys’ glistening foreheads and erupting cheeks. She searched the dark for some sign of their father, but he’d wandered off. Jacob was dazzled by the figures capering in the din and squeezed his big sister’s hand.
The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray country roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.
and the carelessness of casual youthful bullying:
They weren’t bad children, were they? They just wanted to carve their names into something while they were still sharp.
structurally, this is more of a tone-piece than a straightforward narrative. it’s one of those Finnegans Wake riverrun deals where the action on the last page is the action of the first (post-prologue) page, and the part a few chapters in takes place after the last page and so on and so on. we will be given a scene only to return to it some chapters on, from a different perspective, with the revealing details unpacking the emotional truth of the scene. the novel’s ambiguous ending appears in the middle of the book, when you don’t yet know what you are looking at. or for. it definitely is a book that requires a second read—my second time through helped me place the scenes in a more understandable timeline.
it also does that wonderful thing that the beginning of The Goldfinch does—where you know what happens, but not when. or how. so you are just there, reading, waiting for the other shoe to drop, tensing with each new scene—bracing yourself for the “is it here? is this going to be where?? or this…?”
character development is sacrificed for mood, for scratching away at memory—to those familiar primal half-remembered scents and shame blushes of adolescence. and there is some truly lovely writing here.
All children want to go to space. Earth only offers parents wailing about overdraft notices and evening news playing in an empty den. Dead pets too. Childhood is a rot. And so they look up and see stars shiver, ancient information only just now arriving, because that is the only place left to look, and they yearn.
this isn’t a book that’s looking to please everyone. people who value immediacy of plot over delicacy of language will be very frustrated. and there’s some validity those who question whether nonlinear narratives are just gimmicky exercises whose story would not be half as interesting were it written out in the proper sequence. because i don’t think this one would be. but i personally find the temporal fluidity kind of charming—i like that it is disjoined and that it hides its important scenes. occasionally it rambles—there is one particular 10-page passage that i thought was a little self-indulgent and caused imagery overload in my brain, but overall i really liked the writing, and considering it’s a debut, i am as impressed as can be.
you know your tastes—you know if this one is for you. all i know is that i thought it was graceful and accomplished.
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