Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5/5 cats
Sometimes, the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes, it withholds.
i’ve been meaning to review this for a couple of weeks now, and it’s a real challenge, because there is no universe in which i feel qualified to convey how damn good this book is. it’s been compared to morrison and faulkner, the odyssey and the old testament, and that’s probably true, but i’m no authority – i’ve only read one book each from morrison and faulkner, the parts of the odyssey i liked best all involved monsters, and the old testament seems to flavor nearly every book i love – all that vengeful grit lit/western stuff where people do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
but none of that even comes close to what i got out of this book. for one thing, her writing is phenomenally seductive, but it’s the kind of seductive that hypnotizes you right into a steel trap. or like OH I GET IT NOW – the sirens in the damn odyssey. i’d never read her before, but you better believe i’m going to dig up my copy of Salvage the Bones because this right here is the kind of writing that i adore: pure storytelling, strong descriptions, bleak situations, with a spoonful of magical realism on top.
there are two narrative voices here*: thirteen-year-old jojo and his mother leonie. the family dynamic is very messy – leonie is a drug addict who has left jojo and her three-year-old daughter kayla in the care of her elderly parents, mam and pop, breezing in and out of their lives in varying stages of sobriety and maternal inclination while their father michael is incarcerated on drug charges. mam is slowly dying of cancer and pop is haunted by the past, but he is devoted to the children – an absolute rock in the maelstrom. addiction and neglect are bad enough, but ward gives the family an extra layer of conflict – leonie is black, michael is white, and his racist parents disapprove of their relationship so much that they have no relationship whatsoever with their grandchildren. still not bad enough? nope, says ward, and gives that knife one more shakespearian twist – when they were teenagers, michael’s cousin killed leonie’s brother given; a hate crime passed off as a hunting accident. and now, when leonie is high, she sees given’s ghost, a presence unable to communicate with her, but he makes his disapproval of her choices quite obvious.
that ward isn’t one to take the easy road is clear just by introducing these elements, but she also refrains from passing too-easy judgments, or allowing her readers to do so. the natural impulse would be to sympathize with jojo and the difficulties of his life – his birthday party is downright heartbreaking – while making leonie the villain; a mother who does cocaine while pregnant, who abandons her children, who is impatient and inept at the very basic responsibilities of being a mother. however, in her POV chapters, we see what she could be if she weren’t an addict; her good intentions and her self-loathing at all her parental failures, her helplessness in overcoming her addiction despite how much it has cost her – seeing the disappointment in her son harden into resignation, seeing kayla reach out for jojo, never for her, seeing her father distance himself from her:
”Leonie,” Pop says.
I wish he would call me something else. When I was younger he would call me “girl.” When we were feeding the chickens: Girl, I know you can throw that corn further than that. When we were weeding the vegetable garden and I complained about my back hurting: You too young to know pain, girl, with that young back. When I brought report cards home with more As and Bs than Cs: You a smart one, girl. He laughed when he said it, sometimes just smiled, and sometimes said it with a plain face, but it never felt like censure. Now he never calls me by anything but my name, and every time he says it, it sounds like a slap.
it’s hard not to feel pity for her.
this book is a superlative literary achievement in every way.
the road trip is so vividly written: muggy and claustrophobic and perfumed with a toddler’s vomit – it takes you right into all the unpleasantness and tedium of a long car ride and it is relentless. the children are the best i’ve ever read – jojo is a sponge of a character – a dour observer internalizing the world’s lessons, passing judgment as silently as given, taking on the responsibility of caring for kayla in perfect little man fashion. and kayla is so realistically written that she feels like a hologram – sweet, cranky, needy, sick – every scene she’s in made it feel more like watching than reading.
but my most appreciative praise is reserved for how ward maintains emotional balance throughout, and ultimately resists either some cheesily happy ending or a shakespearian heap of bodies; snowballing tragedy for tragedy’s sake. it sticks its landing perfectly, realistically nuanced and whatever a less-overused synonym for “complicated” is.
to sum up: there is no universe in which i feel qualified to convey how damn good this book is.
* ombudsmen will say “three,” but the third is a ghost and only gets three chapters.
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if reader-responses built rocketships and mathematical precision really mattered, i would pipe up and confess that i did not love the last page and a half, so it would be just shy of five stars. but no one’s going off to colonize mars on my say-so, so five stars it is.
