Love and Lament by John Milliken Thompson
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a straightforward and episodic novel about a girl born in 1887 in north carolina who grows to womanhood amidst many personal tragedies and historic events.
mary bet starts life with eight siblings, two parents and most of her grandparents, but through a series of illnesses and accidents and misadventures, she finds herself the last living child, left alone with her father, who is grief-maddened and becoming blasphemous as time goes on and life and loss continue to chip away at his sanity.
(this death toll is not a spoiler if you take a moment to look at the family tree at the beginning—all those tragically short lifespans.)
the novel is both a historical slice-of-life and a character study of a girl, then a woman, well-practiced in the arts of abstemiousness and self-denial bordering on martyrdom. this is a character who feels things deeply, who still carries guilt over things she did when she was five, who makes bargains with a deaf-eared god about what she will sacrifice if he stops taking her family away from her. it is about her yearning for love while at the same time pushing it away from her when it comes. it is about her clear-eyed childhood observances of the effects of liquor and of racial inequality and the justice system, her guilt over her growing estrangement from her father, and her unexpected career path.
it is sad without being maudlin. mary bet’s is a character with deep reserves of fortitude, partly determined by her religion, partly by a stubborn will to survive to defy the curse that seems to be upon her family.
but for me, a book with a crow on the cover (eeevil bird) that opens with a scene in which a young mary bet believes herself to have come face-to-face with the devil, and then multiple deaths bam bam bam, should have some of the supernatural/southern gothic between its covers. but it doesn’t. this is strict realism, which threw me for a loop initially, looking for the the cracks that would let out the dark nasty, but that never happened.
so know that going into it—this will have great storytelling in it, particularly the episode with the banana plants, and every single late-novel scene with mary bet and her father, but it will be 100% this-world.
and it’s lovely. my only quibble is that the events don’t seem to cohere in a narrative whole. the situations happen, but then they rarely carry through to later scenes. my preference is always for a book that is so densely written and packed with foreshadowing and import that it leaves you breathless with “how did the author manage all of that in one little story?” but that’s just a preference and has no real bearing on your enjoyment of this novel. this one doesn’t have the “echo factor” that wags my tail, but it is still a well-told story with a unique and strong main character. definitely worth your time.
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