Book Review: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward - Entrepreneur Generations

This summer, I happened to catch an article that Stanford University was requiring incoming students to read three books this summer: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, and Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. I'm not sure how I previously missed hearing about it -- it did win the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 -- but Salvage the Bones ended up being the first of these three that I read this summer.

I knew next to nothing about the novel going in, except that it dealt with Hurricane Katrina. Dave Eggers' Zeitoun was a powerful read, but that book was much different than this one; this one deals with the storm mostly as something that is throttling towards the characters, giving the readers a sense of dread, but the characters themselves only slowly realize the disaster of what is to come.

The novel features an indelible narrator, Esch, who we first meet just days before Katrina hits, as there are a few reports on the news about a storm that's coming. She is poor, black, and well-educated, as her frequent references to mythology attest, and that combination is a rare one in literature. Esch is also firmly embracing of her sexuality. One could argue that it's only because she has so little to feel powerful about that she grasps onto her sexuality, but this is still rare in literature, it seems to me: a female protagonist who isn't a tomboy, who freely discusses the pleasures of sex. This makes Salvage the Bones a tough read, certainly, especially when we discover early on that Esch -- who is all of 14 years old -- is pregnant with the child of a boy who barely acknowledges her.

That's not the biggest tragedy of this novel, though, by far. The family -- which consists of an alcoholic father and three brothers -- is still reeling from the sudden death of their mother during childbirth some years before. So we have a poor black family, steeped in sorrow and poverty, awaiting a storm that we know is going to decimate them.

Much of the novel's drama comes from older brother Skeetah's devotion to his pit bull China. It's as visceral a bond between boy and dog as we've seen since Old Yeller, and it's to Ward's credit that she can make scenes of Skeetah sending China to illegally fight other dogs come off as full of love and kinship between human and animal. With these scenes, I felt part of a world I've never cared to feel part of before, and immediately developed empathy for the situation even though I find dog fighting to be a particularly heinous act.

All of this moves us towards a finale that we know is coming, and it's just as vivid and tragic as you would imagine when Katrina hits. Jesmyn Ward herself survived Katrina while living in Mississippi, and her descriptions have an air of authenticity to them. But also poetry, a fierce poetry that runs throughout the entire novel.

Salvage the Bones is an intense reading experience, a novel that captures one of the great tragedies of our time -- the one that comes when acts of god and acts of human apathy combine. I write this review in the midst of the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey down in Houston. It's easy to just see the decimation of a city hundreds of miles away as just the flickering images on a television screen. Sometimes it takes literature to humanize them more and years to put the tragedy in perspective. Stanford is probably having discussions similar to this surrounding Salvage the Bones right now, making its selection all the more prescient. This novel is imminently teachable for high school, too, although some of its sex passages probably better for older teenagers.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2gl377u Book Review: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward - Entrepreneur Generations

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