Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn WardMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lots of people have said admiring things about this one, and I’m happy to pile on. It’s deserving of its National Book Award, and I’m adding it to my not-so-long list of books I might teach in my 21st century literature class. What strikes me, maybe with originality and maybe in line with most of what’s been written about this, is the degree to which it interrogates what it means to be a mother.
There is only one substantial female (human) character in this impressive novel, but there’s no shortage of potential maternal figures for our protagonist, Esch, as she contemplates the prospect of motherhood.
The novel opens with a memorable scene where Esch’s brother’s dog, a champion fighter named China, is giving birth. It’s bloody and beautiful, with the muscular and sometimes brutal dog becoming a mother without quite understanding what’s happening to her. She’s instinctual enough to know how to behave, but the new puppies make her vulnerable. By their existence and through the way her body plumps to feed them, she cannot fight with the same ferocity. We learn some of that later, but the opening scene, which Ward draws out with impressive skill, makes clear the heavy price of motherhood.
There’s also Esch’s own mother, lost in giving birth to her younger brother Junior. Although we never meet her, she casts a maternal shadow over the book. She taught her children to forage for food in their Bayou home, and she cared for them in challenging times. She’s just a memory, though, and she’s inextricable from the fact that the violence of childbirth cost her life.
And there’s the notion of Medea, the character from classical literature who, denied her lover Jason, proceeded to kill her own children. Esch reads about her in school, and then she superimposes her story onto the world she’s opening up to. In Medea, she sees a model for a woman who takes control of her role as woman and mother, but she senses as well the destructive – to self and to others – the power of the figure.
Finally, there is Katrina, the massive storm whose water breaks upon the small community, sweeping everything away in a now notorious cataclysm. Perhaps to belabor the point, it’s Katrina that ‘gives birth’ to the new and changed world of the end of the novel, place in which Esch is all the more called upon to understand her power as a potential mother and pillar of her family.
In each of these examples, Esch finds a collision of life-giving and life-taking. She is frightened of what it means for her to give birth herself, yet she’s drawn as well to the awesome power she recognizes in herself as a consequence. That makes this novel, in part, a coming-of-age story, one that gives us a perspective different from so many of the classic, white male narratives that helped define the form.
At the risk of a mild [SPOILER], I love the final scene nearly as much as the opening. In that case, we waited for China to give birth. In the end, we wait, with a peculiar but skillfully sketched optimism, for China to return to the family from the sweep of the storm. Katrina has stolen the puppies of her first litter, but it feels (without Ward quite telling us) that China is on her way back, that, as a mother herself, she has a kind of compatibility with the murderous, mothering storm as well.
Great stuff. I am glad this one lives up to its considerable hype, and I have Ward’s next book already in my pile.
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May 5, 2020:
ReplyDeleteI am reading this for a second time as a I prepare to teach it for a first time, and it certainly holds up. I was a little late to the parade for Ward’s work – though she is still only 43 years old, so I’m that that late – but I think she ranks up there with the best who are going right now.
This one opens with one of my favorite initial scenes in literature. The family’s fighting pit bull, China, is giving birth. Esch, our 16 year old protagonist, has no maternal figures (her own being dead and living in an all-male family) and she is about to discover she is pregnant. She watches as China endures labor pains that transform her from a trained killer into a mother. The dog is bewildered, as is Esch, but the scene has a terrible beauty to it.
In yet one more fabulous invention, Ward has Esch reading the story of Medea in her class. Esch is so taken by it that she sees the world through the lens of Medea, perhaps the most famous “monster mother” of literature – a heroine who, angered at the betrayal of her lover Jason, kills the children they share.
As if all that weren’t enough, this gradually emerges as a narrative around the rising storm we know as Hurricane Katrina. That final powerful ‘female,’ the hurricane that brings a new life in the way it clears away so much of the old, serves as the final major maternal figure Esch can look to.
Throughout, we see a raw, physical beauty. Even before the leavening of the Medea myth, we sense a primal quality. This is the world finding its way into literature rather than the more common reverse.
I’m not sure that adds much to what I’ve said in the past about this, but a novel this tightly written and this gorgeously rendered knows what it’s about.
I am taken by the end here when, for the first time, we learn the names of our characters. (Before then, they are mostly nicknames: Daddy, Junior, Skeet.) We learn as well that the family name is Batiste. Considering, then, that we learn them after the great dousing of the hurricane, it feels baptismal – which is the origin of “Batiste” itself. Katrina, then, is not merely a mother, not merely a warrior queen, but also a kind of priestess.
I liked Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing almost as much as this, so I don’t think you can go wrong with either. She’s a major talent either way, and I’m glad to have her with us.