Book Short
“Mudbound“
By Hillary Jordan
Review by Stephanie Miller
Laura names their new southern Mississippi home, Mudbound. It’s a very remote farm without running water or electricity, and yes, the mud is truly everywhere. The name is her first act of rebellion after her husband Henry drags her and their two young daughters from a civilized life in Memphis to fulfill his dream of working the land. Henry had suggested the name, Fair Fields.
Titled after their farm, “Mudbound,” the debut novel by Hillary Jordan, is a powerful story of one family striving to make its way in the world while slowly destroying another. Since it takes place in post-WW2 Mississippi, where Blacks scraped out a living as sharecroppers and landlords lamented having to pay them a few dollars a day to pick cotton, you can probably guess which family does the ruining and which one gets ruined. There is a bit of justice, however, as neither family gets off easy.
Told in alternating character voices, the story starts at the end, with Henry and his younger brother Jamie digging a grave for their father. Everything is in that initial short chapter. Henry’s optimism and goodness. Pappy’s outright bigotry. The ingrained racism of all whites. How both brothers despised their father in different ways. The commonplace violence against Black people, and Laura’s emerging self-determination. Then, the story unwinds to reveal intense emotional connections driven by love, friendship, lust, hate, and fear.
Jordan doesn’t shrink from ugly issues like racism, sexual politics, infidelity, and war.
Southern Black men who went to war and were (eventually) treated as men by fellow soldiers and the Europeans, came back to the oppressive Jim Crow environment they left behind. Despite also experiencing the same PTSD horrors that haunted white veterans, they either had to re-learn to slump their shoulders and use the back door or they were hunted down and lynched.
Throughout, the thick, rich, fertile soil of the Mississippi Delta is a character itself. Epecially when combined with the heat, mosquitos, and many severe storms. Silence is also a character. Just like today, does standing by constitute endorsement or is it a necessary tactic of self-preservation?
Driving the story forward is Laura. She emerges from her muted city life into a competent, fearless mother and farmer. She milks the cows, knifes the snakes, nurtures food from the land, and handles a shotgun with precision. Her perspective matures over time, but leaves us with a question. Are there some moral positions that are absolute or should we take into consideration things like time and place?
Micro Shorts
“The Confessions of Frannie Langton“
By Sara Collins
Lady’s maid Frannie Langton is accused of the brutal double murder of her employers. She claims she cannot recall what happened or how she came to be covered in blood in her mistress’s bed. From her cell in London’s Old Bailey, she writes her confession as a memoir. She relates how the emotional and physical torture she endured as a mulatto slave on a Jamaica plantation led to her current scandalous status as whore, manipulative witch, and bloodthirsty criminal bent on revenge. Taught to read and carry out horrific scientific experiments on fellow slaves by a debauched master, her desperate need for love and validation is completely warped.
How can we blame her for crashing heedlessly into unhealthy relationships and tripping over societal norms? Her confession is more than a murder mystery; it’s an indictment of racist and misogynist society itself. This historical fiction is based in part on the author’s ancestor’s experience in Jamaica. It is both riveting and disturbing, but completely un-put-down-able.
“Atavists”
By Lydia Millet
This Pulitzer Prize finalist collection of short stories is an insightful party with a loosely connected community of neighbors and colleagues. Each story centers on someone’s intense longing. The stories are superb – witty, clever, intense, modern, and real.
Many characters are raging — about climate change, racism and bigotry, the frivolity of youth, their midlife crisis, the death of a loved one, or getting ghosted by an ex. Reading these stories is a little bit like everyone in your social feed is actually interesting and erudite, sharing bits of their lives in the most absurd, charming, and narcissistic manner. And yet you still really like them and want the best for them. The stories are so delicious! I read them all in one sitting. Then immediately went back and re-read them slowly to savor all that is contained between the lines.
“Clear”
By Carys Davies
This short novel is a beautiful ode to language. Reverend John Ferguson innocently agrees to travel to a far north Scottish island to evict the sole resident as part of a (real life) state-sanctioned rural removal project that tore small farmers and landowners from their homes and forced them into cities or sharecropping arrangements, forcing them from independent subsistence owners into poverty-stricken, wretched tenants.
John doesn’t speak the island’s unique dialect, but he slowly learns words while recovering from a nasty fall that served as his introduction to Ivar, who nurses him back to health in his rustic island home. Ivar teaches John the many words for sea, for the special blues of twilight, for the way the wind plays over the grass, and for storms. John is dependent on Ivar’s goodwill and ministration for survival. As such, he is hesitant to tell him why he has actually arrived. At first it was because of a lack of shared language, and then it is from fear of losing this strange, beautiful friendship. Despite being trapped on this lonely, barren rock in the middle of the sea, quite a bit happens between these two.
“Clear” is a rich page turner. Davies’ prose is melodic and mesmerizing. He fully transports us to this remote, wild land where communication is almost solely dependent on reading the other person’s heart.
Bayside resident Stephanie Miller is a voracious reader and bibliophile. Stephanie spends a lot of time lost in the stacks of bookstores and libraries. But you can find her online @StephanieSAM.
