Hurricane By The Tail

SALVAGE THE BONES by Jesmyn Ward is a novel with a lot of urgency. It has a palpable pulse -- a ticking clock even. We know what will happen to these people - in this place. It is certain. So the suspense - the pace - must be driven by other forces. It is. It is there in each paragraph. There is a sense of foreboding in almost every sentence.

We know what will happen. For this reason SALVAGE THE BONES is a haunting -- a haunted - book. We know what bad is coming. We suffer through all of the seemingly smaller tragedies - Esch's crisis - the dog's crisis - Esch's several brothers' aspirations and crises. And the novel barrels ahead and the storm keeps advancing and we have to be swept along. Ward's language works magically to set and keep its pace.

So you do get it. You begin to understand how the thing - the hurricane - came up and trapped up all of these people and rearranged everything in so short a time.

We saw pictures on TV and in magazines and newspapers. They say that one picture is worth a thousand words. The implication, of course, is that it is better, more informative and more economical to have a video or photograph. Yes, but . . . Just because they were impoverished - abjectly poor --didn't mean they were unable or unwilling or too stupid to prepare. Pictures need context - explication. Ward gives this to us in 272 fast pages. Fast, but dense with minute detail. Occasionally you forget about the impending hurricane. Only for brief, intense moments though. Then you go back to foreboding. You get so caught up with caring about these people that you feel motivated to warn them. It is a measure of this book's magic that you do feel like calling out to them to beware of what's gaining on them. You are so frightened that their fragile lives will be ruined further in the storm that you forget about the power of resilience, resolve and the other intangibles of human character. SALVAGE THE BONES addresses a question that those of us who do not live in the Gulf often ask. I was shown that this is precisely the wrong question. This book is worth several thousand pictures. We who do not "know" there intimately can gain a deeper understanding of "there" where the hurricane came through reading this novel. Incomplete depictions are replaced in some measure - enlarged upon in - SALVAGE THE BONES. SALVAGE THE BONES by Jesmyn Ward is The 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction. It is a stunningly successful novel of our times.