Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison

"Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family--rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly.  At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale.  Bone finds herself caught in the family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney.  Her stepfather, Daddy Glen, calls Bone "cold as death, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty," yet Anney needs Glen.  At first gentle with Bone, Daddy Glen becomes steadily colder and more furious--until their final, harrowing encounter, from which there can be no turning back."

Ah, yes, the joy of being a college student -- summer classes...  This was one of the books assigned for my American Souths (yes, that "s" is supposed to be there) class.  We read a novel each week (no exaggeration) that is supposed to help us gain some sort of appreciation for the history and literature surrounding different parts of the oft-difficult-to-concretely-define American South.  This book happened to be the one for which I signed up to lead the discussion and write a context essay (i.e. I have to find some major theme, locate articles on said topic, and relate everything back to how an understanding of those outside sources will better our understanding/appreciation of that part of the South).  You might be wondering why -- if we read a novel each week -- we're already into July and I haven't reviewed another book yet.  To be completely honest (don't tell my professor!) I haven't read any of the other books and have made it through with flying colors thus far!  My professor even sent out an email naming me as one of the best and most thorough contributors this semester!  How do I do it?  I've developed an excellent talent:  I'm a brilliant skimmer.  I absorb a lot of information in a short space of time and am able to apply it in a cohesive and eloquent manner.  I promise I'm not a student who normally does this, but I was very put-off by the fact that the professor expected us to have a novel read by the third day of the semester and hadn't even sent out an email telling us that we should be sure to order it early, let alone that it should be done by almost the first day of class!  I wouldn't be complaining if she'd just sent out an email like every other professor I've had, giving the students fair warning.  I don't think it's ethical to expect students to be able to do such a thing in three days -- we all take online classes for a reason!  Her response when I told her that I'd not yet received my book and (politely!) asked if there was an email I'd missed telling us that we needed to have this book read by the third day of class?  "I'm not going to change the syllabus because you didn't order your books early enough."  Nice.  Needless to say -- as someone who wants to become a college professor -- two things happened.  1) I learned how NOT to treat my students.  It's fine if you want your students to have a book read by even the first day of class, just let them know!  2) Being a jerk only discourages normally enthusiastic students to find ways around your system -- they know they're smart and they're only going to try to find ways to outsmart you.

Moving onto the actual review!  This was the first book I received when I ordered my books for this semester.  I figured I would try to be proactive and just pick up each book and read as it arrived.  Having lived in an area of the South very near to the one that Allison writes about, I took an interest in the setting.  A lot of the characters were lively and fun to read -- others were dark and made me rather uncomfortable.  I enjoyed a lot of the uncles -- especially Earl.  Daddy Glen, on the other hand, was disturbingly complex.  I still cannot quite put my finger on why he does what he does to Bone.  Does it get him off?  Does he hate Bone?  What did she ever do to him?  Why does he do it when he does?  Why does he seem to do it out of love for Anney?  What started it all?  What made him focus on Bone?  I think the disturbing thing is that, even after finishing this book, I can't answer a lot of these questions.

I had a difficult time getting through the chunk of the book where Bone becomes obsessed with religion and gospel music.  Whether that was simply because I'm not that religious, myself, or because it took up too large a chunk of the story to keep the flow, it's difficult to tell.

A couple of things bothered me about the last few chapters of the book:  1)  What happened to Reese, Bone's younger half-sister?  She seemed to disappear from the last part altogether.  I don't want to give away what happens, but part of me can see how people are so absorbed in what happened to Bone that they don't have time to ponder Reese, but Bone was close with Reese.  I'd wonder what happened to my sister after a few days.  I'd expect my aunts to know where she'd gone and for her location to at least be mentioned somewhere.  She's under twelve-years-old for crying out loud!  2) Bone's grandmother also seems to disappear from the last few chapters.  For a woman who played such a huge role in Bone's early life, I would have expected that she would have at least been there for Bone.  Looking back, I think Allison was trying to hint at the fact that Bone's grandmother was getting older and wasn't quite "all there" anymore, but it's one thing to explain the absence, it's another thing to ignore it -- it makes it all the more obvious.

I went through phases of loving (I loved the beginning with Anney's quest to amend Bone's birth certificate -- it's what really drew me into the book in the first place), feeling sympathy for, hating, and loathing Anney Boatwright, Bone's mother.  As someone who has never had such a life (as I'm sure a lot of the readers of this book have not) it was difficult to appreciate her tough choices and some of her actions.  I think one of the most important things to remember is that Anney is still only in her early-to-mid-twenties!  She's a mother of two girls, has had two husbands -- one of whom died tragically young while she was pregnant -- and has worked extremely hard to provide for her little family.  Taking a step back helped me to realize that she's grasping onto Daddy Glen because he's been there.  He might not have been reliable or stable or kind, but he hadn't up and left her.  Her age absolutely has to be taken into account.  She's not some stable-minded adult -- she was a baby who had babies.  This all adds depth and complexity to her character.  I'm not going to say that I liked her at the end of the book, but understanding all of this helped me to see what might have made her make such a decision.

This is probably minor (and I hope I'm not the only one), but I had a hard time pinpointing when in time this story happened.  There were a few hints, but not many until much later in the story.  It would have been really easy for this to just be backwoods, outdated lost-to-time and have taken place even recently.  A simple way to give the readers a sense of time would have been to talk about the model of car Anney drove.  One word would have solved this.  Instead, I spent most of the book flipflopping back and forth between believing this poor (in more ways than one) family was stuck without modern conveniences, and that this book took place in the '50s and '60s.

Overall, the book was deep, dark, and parts of it were difficult to get through.  I liked bits and parts of it and appreciated the depth of Bone's character.  Would I read it again?  Nope.  Would I recommend it?  Not to many -- unless I think they can take the weight of the story.  Allison's writing was interesting and she took this subject to a different place than I'd read before.

I Want to Show You More: Jamie Quatro

"Sharp-edged and fearless, mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, Jamie Quatro's publishing debut is a stunning and subversive portrait of modern infidelity, faith, and family.

"Set around Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, Quatro's seamless weave of hypnotic stories range from the traditional to the fabulist as they reveal lives torn between spirituality and sexuality in the new American South.  These fifteen linked tales present readers with dark theological complexities, fractured marriages, and mercurial temptations.  Throughout the collection, a mother in her late thirties relates the various stages of her extramarital affair while she and others lay bare their notions of God, sex, raising children, and running:  a wife comes home with her husband to find her lover's corpse in their bed; a girl's embarrassment over attending a pool party with her quadriplegic mother turns to fierce devotion under the gaze of other guests; and a husband asks his wife to show him how she would make love to another man.

"Sultry, acute, startlingly intimate, and enticingly cool, I Want to Show You More marks the thrilling debut of an exhilarating new voice in American fiction."

It just so happens that I wrote a book review for this collection of short stories for my "Writing Fiction:  Unlikable Characters" class:

Will Gladly Accept “More” from Quatro

            Jamie Quatro’s collection of short stories in “I Want to Show You More” have the noteworthy ability to draw readers in with their personal, intimate tones; their often dark and extremely human characters and situations; and her enthralling sense of place.  Most unique, perhaps, is Quatro’s ability to subtly weave together her characters and individual stories in the collection.  One can read each story individually and lose no enjoyment, but a new level is achieved when reading it as a collection.  The reader recognize names and places from previous stories and makes fascinating connections that only add a new layer to the book as a whole.  A great deal of the stories deal with death—often as a result of cancer, questioning one’s religion, issues with fidelity, running (rather, the themes of dedication, perseverance, and struggle associated with the activity) and life in and around Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee—a place that seems to personify the tumultuous state of its residence, who, as portrayed in the story, are in constant states of flux and identity struggles.

            Refreshingly, Quatro is unafraid to discuss often taboo subjects like adultery, which she did in “Decomposition:  A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives,” where the main character’s affair with another man produces a metaphorical corpse—a grotesquely descriptive manifestation of the emotions resulting from the relationship—around which she and her husband must learn to live their lives.  As the body decays, she has to learn to cope with life after the affair—the decomposition cleverly mirrors the “stages of grief” taught in every Introduction to Psychology course.  This story itself is uniquely structured.  Quatro creates a clinical tone to the story through her use of medical terms for the actual physical decomposition of the corpse (i.e. the section titled, “Algor Mortis:  early postmortem stage in which the body gradually loses heat to the ambient environment,” is used to personify the initial break off of the affair (Quatro 5)), which balances out the often stomach-churning descriptions and prevents them from trending toward gratuitous.  Most readers can only take so many descriptions of “viscous black fluid ooz[ing] from the corner of the [corpse’s] mouth” (13). 

Similarly taboo, “Georgia the Whole Time” deals with the issue of living with a cancer diagnosis in another clever parallel.  The main character and her family move to Lookout Mountain, Georgia for her husband’s job, but the location quickly becomes a benefit for her cancer treatments.  As she is forced to get used to the oddities of the town—how people reorganize the rooms in their homes to have cheaper taxes thanks to the state line that runs through the town, the leash laws, the way there seems to be a constant undercurrent of battle (the resonating echoes from the Civil War)—Quatro uses these as an interesting medium to convey the character’s struggle to cope and regain her footing after her diagnosis in a very non-cliché and unexpected manner.

“Here” is the sequel to “Georgia the Whole Time”—told from the husband’s point of view—even though it is located first in the book.  It deals similarly with cancer, but with the wake it leaves in the aftermath of death.  Quatro bluntly—yet rather eloquently—approaches the grief and struggles of a man who lost his wife and watched her waste away.  He has to rediscover his role now that he is left alone to care for their children.  When he finally realizes that his children need him (because he is a self-professed “needy one” (51)) Neil allows himself to realize how he should have been cherishing his time with them and fully realized his place in their lives—his identity.

A similar rediscovery of one’s self takes place in “Better to Lose an Eye,” where a young girl tries to cope with her warring emotions concerning her quadriplegic mother.  Quatro’s way of handling complex, confusing inner conflict is moving and relatable.  It brings her characters to life in a short span of writing.  It takes Lindsey most of the story to realize that she does, indeed, love her helpless mother, but when she does, the scene is supremely touching.  Quatro writes, “She loved her, loved her desperately; she would sit with her, facing her, her back to the party, to the world.  She would hold Mama’s crumpled hands, she would kiss them, she didn’t care who saw.  They would sit together, the two of them, with only the blue sky and clouds drifting overhead.  They would sit there until God had mercy and turned them both to stone” (118).

Quatro’s approach to these stories—these characters who live in this unique town straddling the Tennessee-Georgia line—is captivating.  Personally, I have never read any other author to whom I can compare her writing.  Several of the stories were told in a similar tone and perspective to Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be the Other Woman” in the sense that they really draw the reader in through use of a particular perspective—the use of “you” helps the reader to put him- or herself into the life of the main character.  “Decomposition” contains this perspective as well as the issue of adultery, while “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” sucks the reader into a twisted world where running—struggling through life with unfair burdens—takes on a whole new meaning.

However, a couple of the stories seemed lumped in simply because they take place in the Lookout Mountain, Georgia/Tennessee area.  Even though I found “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement” to be extremely complex and interesting, its oddities did not quite seem to fit with the rest of the collection.  The only strings tying it with the other stories were the theme of running and the setting.  Something similar happened with “1.7 to Tennessee.”  The story—about a determined elderly woman on a mission—was only really connected to the others by (again) the setting, and a very brief mention of some characters that are in a few of the other passages.  The tenuous connections here mess with the flow of the work as a whole, though they make interesting individual works.

Overall, Quatro’s collection was captivating.  The tales were beautifully tragic in their oft-sad plots, and the settings were rich and enhanced every aspect of her stories.

I suppose I cheated on this review by having one already prepared...  I would like to add (in my own "normal" review voice as opposed to my "scholarly" one) that I did enjoy the collection for the most part.  Some of the stories seemed a bit too "out there" and contrasted too sharply to the harsh, unadulterated reality of the rest of the stories.  My favorite aspect was probably the fact that the stories worked both as a whole and as individual pieces -- a mark of, I feel, brilliant talent.  Quatro's characters were rich and fascinating.  I loved how unafraid she was to address things that many authors stay away from.  She wasn't afraid to write about adulterous women and needy men and people who find themselves in periods of questioning their beliefs.  She had many characters that could be deemed "unlikable," but what makes them so fascinating is the fact that, even though they are supremely flawed by things like moral standards, we readers cannot help but find things in them that are captivating.  It's difficult to not want to read more.

I recommend this collection of short stories to those readers who are not afraid to test boundaries, think outside of the box, and look for a meaning deeper than the words they are reading.