Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

First published in 2008; reprint edition published by Scribner on January 16, 2018

Where the Line Bleeds is Jesmyn Ward’s first novel, and the first of three that are set in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Like the generations before them, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle have grown up in Bois Sauvage. Their mother left her twins when they were five to search for a better life in Atlanta, but she shows up occasionally to add a dysfunctional element to the family story. The twins haven’t seen much of their drug-addicted father, but he’s released from prison and makes a sudden appearance midway through the novel. The twins still live with their grandmother, Ma-Mee, and they have no plan to leave the only place that feels like home.

Joshua and Christophe graduate in the summer of 2005 and begin to look for work, applying at fast food restaurants and Wal-Mart and Piggly Wiggly.  When Joshua gets a job at the docks and Christophe doesn’t, Christophe faces a difficult choice about his future.

Some of the novel’s dramatic tension comes from the relationship that the twins have with the father and mother, but most of the story’s interest results from uncertainty about the twins’ ability to remain close to each other as they confront their individual problems. Issues of conflict involve a woman who seems to take an interest in both brothers, and a well-meaning cousin who helps Christophe earn money in a way that displeases Joshua.

Issues of race lurk in the background (faded David Duke signs send a deliberate message to blacks about the racist intent of property owners), but the novel is not explicitly about race. It is about the strength of family ties as two young men struggle with hardship and other issues, some financial and others familial. Where the Line Bleeds is also about survival. Both Joshua and Christophe are challenged in many ways following their graduation. How they deal with those challenges will determine whether their lives move forward.

Dialect and atmospheric descriptions of food and music create a strong sense of culture and place. Jesmyn Ward’s prose is smooth and graceful, but not flashy. She avoids literary trickery and lets the story tell itself. The novel derives its power from its simplicity. The truth it tells about family as a counterweight to poverty and hate is timeless.

RECOMMENDED

Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates

Published by Picador on January 9, 2018

In 1982, when Patrick is twelve years old, his friend Matthew ties a girl named Hannah to a tree and shoots her dozens of times with a BB gun. Patrick does nothing to stop it. One of the BBs enters her eye and, as far as the boys can tell, kills her. That afternoon shapes the rest of Patrick’s life.

In 2008, Patrick is unemployed. He spends his days testing and blogging recipes. He has violent fantasies about the man who fired him, and has in fact begun to stalk him. Patrick is being treated for anxiety but his condition cannot match his wife’s. Her nightmares are relentless; she needs therapy more than Patrick. Still, Patrick’s therapist asks him to write about his past, and it is from that writing that we learn about the events of Patrick’s childhood.

At some point, Patrick’s past and present intertwine and the reader wonders how Patrick will cope with the flood of stressors that confront him. After a third of the story has been told, the novel shifts to Hannah’s point of view as she tells her true crime story, deliberately mimicking the techniques of In Cold Blood — if Capote had been recalling his life as a twelve-year-old girl. That’s the least successful segment of the novel. Hannah’s voice never struck me as genuine.

The novel changes points of view and time frames several times before the reader hears from Matthew, whose perspective adds another layer to the reader’s evolving understanding of the events that shaped the characters. Pretty much every life in Grist Mill Road is touched by violence, most of it senseless. And pretty much everyone in the novel is keeping a secret, a couple of which involve murders. Of course, in fiction as in life, secrets will out, and their revelations inspire most of the novel’s drama. The danger in the approach is that the secrets, once revealed, will seem melodramatic or too coincidental to accept. Grist Mill Road approaches both of those lines but never crosses them. Christopher Yates keep control of his material at all times, producing a story that is reasonably convincing.

None of the central characters deserve what they get, but none of them deserve sainthood. Characterizations are strong and the plot takes surprising turns as it approaches an eventful ending, but the strength of Grist Mill Road is that the initial story seems simple, but with the addition of each new perspective, the seemly simple story gains weight and meaning. The story illustrates the limitations imposed by our own singular perspective — only by seeing the same events through the eyes of others can we approach a full understanding of those events. The way the different perspectives gradually reframe the story in the reader’s mind is my primary reason for recommending Grist Mill Road.

RECOMMENDED

The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines

Published by Vintage on August 29, 2017

Brady Sims is an old man. He starts the novel by shooting a prisoner in a courtroom after the prisoner is sentenced to death. The prisoner happens to be his son. Brady tells the deputies to tell the sheriff to give him two hours before the sheriff comes for him.

Cub reporter Louis Guerin, the only black journalist on the newspaper’s newly-integrated staff, happens to be in the courtroom when the shooting occurs. Assigned to write a “human interest story” about Brady, he goes to the African-American barbershop to gather the local gossip. The rambling barbershop story he hears about Brady Sims and his son is the heart of the book. Delivered in a priceless Louisiana dialect, the barbershop tale creates an intimate sense of place and time.

Two short sections round out the novel. One is told from the perspective of a white sheriff who has lost friends because he refuses to echo their racist attitudes, and because he has befriended Brady. It falls to the sheriff to address Brady’s actions. The last section returns to the barbershop and the cub reporter’s human interest story.

The Tragedy of Brady Sims is a story about the art of storytelling. One of the men listening to the barbershop story gets in the doghouse with his woman for staying to listen instead of going home, because they “start telling you a story and they know you won’t leave ‘til you heard the end.” The end is a long time coming, because a good storyteller weaves together a bunch of other stories and doesn’t bother to filter details just because they have nothing to do with the story being told. And occasionally others with relevant knowledge (or not) chime in, making the story even longer.

This is a short novel, and it’s all the more absorbing because of its brevity. The novel has important points to make about the racial divide and the bridges that cross the divide, but the focus on the barbershop as a place where truths are told — entertaining and gossipy truths, but truths nonetheless — makes an even stronger point about the importance of community and oral history.

RECOMMENDED

Sisters of the Cross by Alexei Remizov

Published in Russia in 1910; published in translation by Columbia University Press on December 19, 2017

Sisters of the Cross is a novel of dark themes. Life is brutal and unfair. Love robs men of their senses. People who hold power wield it arbitrarily. “Man is born into the world and is already condemned”; sentenced to death on an unknown date with no hope of reprieve. But Alexei Remizov does offer a mild prescription of relief from the darkness: “If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they were all granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.” But what are the odds of that happening?

Remizov takes note of the characters in Sisters of the Cross, seeing them through the eyes of Marakulin Piotr Alekseevich. Marakulin is unexpectedly fired from his job in Petersburg because of a bookkeeping error, perhaps caused by his kind-hearted willingness to issue paychecks to people who had not earned them. He spends his savings and sells his property, moves to a smaller room in his rooming house (the Burkov), and falls ill before he comes to see himself as liberated. His life needs no purpose, he decides; it is enough “just to see, just to hear, just to feel.” But is it?

Much of Marakulin’s attention is on the other characters who live in the Burkov. They include a woman who loves religion and the sea, a clown and his artistic brother, a woman who reads cards and is living under an unfair curse, a teacher at the girls’ high school, and two students, Vera and Verochka. Vera is a student who aspires to be a doctor while Verochka is a theater student who claims to be a brilliant actress but who is “somehow always saying different things, and you couldn’t fathom where the real truth was and what was just her imagination.” Vera and Verochka are later joined by Verushka, a 15-year-old orphan who has experienced enough abuse to last a lifetime. All of the residents have sad tales and, to some degree, are living unfortunate lives. They come and go from the rooming house as the novel moves forward, but Verochka eventually leaves for good, much to Marakulin’s regret, given the obsession that he develops for her.

Marakulin is obsessed in a different way with a general’s widow who lives in one of the better rooms in the Burkov. Obsessed as in, he wants to kill her. Marakulin nearly drives himself mad with the thought that she, “in rude good health, carefree, sin-free, and immortal, a vessel of God’s choosing, the louse, was sleeping the sweetest of sleeps.” He rejects that kind of life, “life as an absolute entitlement,” a life “with no aim, simply seeing, hearing, and feeling: the life of a louse.” He wants to feel supreme joy, and comes to believe that he can only achieve joy with the absent Verochka, “the source of his life.”

The novel’s most tormented character is Marakulin’s mother Zhenia. We learn in Marakulin’s backstory that Zhenia was used repeatedly by men who were blinded by lust. Zhenia responded by slashing crosses into her flesh with a razor.

While the arbitrary unfairness of life is a dominant theme, it is linked to “wandering Holy Russia, so meek in her wandering beggary, Holy Russia, engirdled by poverty in its pilgrim’s belt from the Bogoliubsky monastery, Holy Russia, so humble, long-suffering, and patient, who will not make her own coffin, but can only build a funeral pyre and burn herself upon it.” To Marakulin, suffering is a way of life in Russia. It is inevitable and, at least for those of unfortunate birth, unavoidable.

Readers looking for an affirmation of faith in the justice of the universe won’t find it in Sisters of the Cross. The novel’s value lies in its intricate characterizations, both of Marakulin and of the other Burkov residents. The story is bleak, and the bleakness is emphasized by Remizov’s repetition of dark phrases and sentences (and occasional paragraphs), but life for most people in Remizov’s Russia was bleak, and Sisters of the Cross is true to that sad reality.

RECOMMENDED

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore

Published by Del Rey on August 22, 2017

Reincarnation Blues begins with the protagonist, Milo, being eaten by a shark. Milo has died almost ten thousand times since 2600 B.C. but still, being eaten by a shark isn’t a pleasant death. His most recent life revolved around fishing and drinking, which didn’t earn him many points on Judgment Day. The fact that he’s having sex with Death (when he's not alive) doesn’t improve his standing with those who give judgment, but falling in love with Death is never a good idea.

Sadly, Milo’s first life was his best, and the rewards bestowed after each subsequent death have dwindled. His hopes of reaching Perfection quickly ended centuries before his current death. But Milo enjoys living imperfect lives; he’s decided that Perfection is overrated, much to the consternation of the spiritual guides who encourage or chastise him after every death. But Milo is running out of lives. He needs to get it right soon to avoid Nothingness.

The novel skips around among Milo’s thousands of lives, not giving much attention to his stint as a catfish (that one was a punishment). Milo’s most interesting lives include the one he was living when most life on Earth ended (not long from now), the one he lived inside a prison made from a hollow asteroid after humanity spread to the stars, and the one in which he discovers that Buddha has Alzheimer’s. But there are many other lives, and they all teach him something, even if the lesson is that it’s not smart to reach for deadly spiders.

As you might expect, a novel about the difficulty of reaching perfection comes with messages. One message is that people can’t be productive if they are angry or afraid. Another is that people are shaped by when and where they are born (Milo appreciated the lives in which he knew Muslims were evil because he was born a Christian, and those in which he knew Christians were evil because he was born a Muslim, since God was making it easy for him to identify evil). Another is that (perhaps because of how we are shaped by the place and time of our birth), overcoming limits and achieving Perfection (or even decency) isn’t easy.

But the real message is that living is itself a form of Perfection. The better your life, measured in terms of how you help others, or at least avoid harming them, the more rewarding your life will be. That’s a good message, and Reincarnation Blues teaches it with a great deal of humor and very little preaching. It’s easy to root for Milo and his girlfriend Death, because they’re just ordinary people (well, except for Death), doing the best they can with the lives they have. Or maybe not the best they can, because Milo has a tendency to veer us away from Perfection, but the story offers hope that living a meaningful life is an attainable goal, and that placing an emphasis on love and compassion and helpfulness is the best route to make a life worthy — even if we might have to do it a few thousand times more before we get it right.

RECOMMENDED