Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall
Whistling Past the Graveyard

Gallery, 2013

Summer of 1963, Cayuga Springs, Mississippi. Nine year old Starla Claudelle lives at her grandma's house. Her father works at an oil rig and spends little time at home, and her mother had gone off to Nashville six years ago to become a singer, and now only sends rare postcards. Stubborn and independent, Starla is often punished by her grandmother Mamie for petty mischief. Despite Grandmother’s harsh words about her mother, Starla praises her mother and waits for the moment when she becomes famous and take Starla from her grandmother.

It seems like Starla doesn’t go to school. She studies a little at home, plays with the neighbor girl, kicks older boys, in the beginning even breaking the nose of one of them. For that Mamie grounds Starla on Independence Day, not allowing her to leave the house to watch the fireworks. Starla nevertheless is out of the house, plays on the playground, where a neighbor catches her. The neighbor threatens to complain to Starla’s grandmother, and then the girl, still in fear of harsher punishment, runs away from home and gets to the highway. Starla plans to walk to Nashville, finds her mother to live with her. Tired to walk, the girl changes her plan and takes a ride. A black woman named Eula on a truck picks up Starla, who are puzzled by a baby inside, a white baby. It begins to darken, and Eula offers Starla to spend the night at her ho,e, and in the morning Eula’s husband Wallace will take the girl where she wants to go. Starla agrees, but when he sees bear-like Wallace, the owner of bad temper and addiction to strong alcohol, the desire to spend the night at Eula’s house disappears. Wallace pulls his wife, baby James and Starla with force home and closes the door on all the bolts.

Whistling Past the Graveyard can be compared with fireworks: it’s, too, something noisy, incessant, kind to the eyes, catchy and colorful. The plot of the novel is as realistic as it is implausible in its fabulousness. I walked from my grandmother here is piling on rights of African Americans, dear, but distant Mother is a witch, and a nine-year girl giving battle to Ku Klux Klan.

Much of the credit that the novel was a success, belongs to the protagonist Starla. If she were not so independent, persistent and resourceful, all the adventures, sooner or later, would have turned sour, and would have made a moist cake of journalism and ordinary story of the runaway child. Crandall made Starla an insightful storyteller, but childishly naive, fair, but merciful. It's hard to write more than 300 pages from the POV of the nine year old child, so much so that it was authentic. Crandall gives Starla as much knowledge about the world as it is needed for the story. 300 pages look convincing, the final 30 are not quite. Actually, in the final pages, we read about the rights of blacks, Martin Luther King, protests, and here it turns into unconvincing journalism. Child will hardly understand this difficult matter.

The story of Starla’s wanderings is a story of splitting the world into black and white, literally. Child maybe for the first time sees an unfair balance between black and white, and begins to realize that the world is not black and white, and everything is mixed. Black can be white. White can be black.

The plot of the book is a whirlwind, flying swiftly, you do not want to be interrupted even for a second. But stylistically Crandall is more conservative and cautious. The novel is written in the southern dialect, but only to some degree. All the characters here, black and white, speak with dialect. And yet the author is afraid of losing literary style. Characters express themselves with something between a dialect and correct speech. So, illiterate people still express themselves not quite illiterately. Crandall gear ups on the dialect, then she reduces the pressure and the characters then almost completely switch to the literary language. We won’t find a complete authenticity there, but the novel reads without much effort.

Susan Crandall has written an excellent novel, which, if not placed in the annals of fiction of the South, then certainly delivers a lot of pleasure.

The Deaths

Mark Lawson
The Deaths

Picador, 2013

Four families live in the fictional Middlebury in homes in the suburbs, which were built for the aristocracy. They call themselves The Eight, mainly communicate only among themselves and goes to London only to the airport and commute on train to work.

Men of the family all work, and among their wives work only two. Max is a tycoon, always doing business. Johnny is a prosperous lawyer, Tom is a security expert, and Simon is a PR manager of a bank. His wife Tasha runs a catering company, and Tom's wife Emily is a doctor, a specialist in chronic diseases. Max's second wife (he is 56, she is much younger) Jenno sometimes teaches courses and gives advice to families on reducing costs, and Johnny's wife Libby mostly is busy shopping and discussing of au pairs.

The novel, in fact, opens with the deaths from the title. Courier of coffee in containers delivers coffee to one of the houses where he sees a family shot to death, wife and children, as well as dogs. Victims of mass killings are from one of the above families, but Lawson before the end will keep in secret, who were killed and who killed them.

And if the main plot line will explain in a meticulous manner the life of The Eight, the secondary storyline will focus on the police investigation. There is very little to investigate, and the detectives just wander around the murder scene, discussing the murdered family.

Four families are seen in their daily lives, and with each chapter husbands and their wives become more disgusting and repulsive. The main storyline begins with the description of men on the train London. They all are late for work when the train suddenly stops and an announcement explains that someome threw himself under the trainand the train can’t go any further, and the four men are even not surprised with this: suicides like that happen on English railroads every week. The men are only annoyed, but they do not feel any sympathy to a suicide victim: they think they will never fall that low.

Lawson, like a real surgeon, dissects the top layer of British society: he stabs and cuts, sews and cuts up, exposing the insides – people’s vices. He is amazing surgeon, but he just gives too much anesthesia. He forgot to check if the reader feels anything.

The problem with this novel lies not in the fact that the characters are all unsympathetic, as we have seen even more vile, but that Lawson is not particularly empathetic to his own creations. And if the author doesn’t care, what to expect from the reader?

If we discard the murders, which is not only bait for the story, but also a way to show that there is a punishment for sins, the plot of the novel is compressed into a parade of little connected scenes of everyday life of the wealthy. Lawson spins his characters, exposing all their imperfections. Work, leisure, sex, church, holiday, day-to-day life - Lawson just can not stop. He throws out the details, going from one family to another. He tells hurriedly, as if afraid to stop. It is not surprising that the novel has grown to such a volume.

No doubt, the author is witty, has a keen eye, can make you laugh. He seemed to doubt his own abilities: making their characters vile, Lawson can not stop, as if considering that we did not see enough how disgusting all the characters were.

If you do not belong to their circle and their social status, you are nobody. But why, then, even to the 400th page you hardly recall who is who in this book, and who married to whom? Where is the humanity to his own creations? He is interested to look at them under a microscope, but the characters from the book after closer look remain types.

Those readers who expect from The Deaths complicated police investigation will be disappointed. Murder plot line is only auxiliary, giving no surprises.

Lawson is sure talented, but in this book even those characters that remained alive turned out lifeless.

The Silent Wife

A.S.A. Harrison
The Silent Wife

Penguin Books, 2013

The novel is set in Detroit, Michigan. In alternating chapters, from the point of view of the wife and the husband, the novel tells the story of a failing marriage that lasted 20 years. Jodi Brett is a psychotherapist, 45 years old, young-looking, quiet, silent, in fact, as says the novel's title. From the first pages we are already told that in a few months this fragile woman becomes a killer of her husband.

Jodi likes to be the mistress of the house, keeper of the hearth. She cooks dinner for her husband when he comes home from work, she knows his habits. Jodi is responsible for the food, her husband, Todd Gilbert, - for the preparation of cocktails. They take turns walking a dog by the name of Freud, a frequent subject of jokes. Todd is the earner in the family: he is a professional renovator of buildings, he has his own stable business. He rose from the bottom performing once all repairs by hand. After the first successful project Todd was able to go up the ladder and became his own boss.
Jody practices at home, while her husband at work, Todd brings a stable money into the house, the couple live in a spacious condo, they are financially fine. But the thing is that Todd regularly cheats on his wife (started to cheat almost immediately after they got together), and she turns a blind eye to it. She already knows how to find the signs by which one can determine whether a husband had been with someone or not. Jodi never reproached her husband, never tried to reason with him or stop him sleeping around. She learned to tolerate these betrayals, not pay them much attention, while her husband comes home to her. They are comfortable together, they form a family, but for 20 years they had no children. The state of things in the family is broken when Todd makes his 21-year-old lover Natasha pregnant.

The Silent Wife is called by the publisher a psychological thriller. Such a definition is only half true. The novel lacks any elements thriller should have: yes, there is a violent death, but not all the books, where someone is killed, can be called a thriller. The killer and the victim are called at the beginning, and there won’t be surprises about that (although this does not mean that the book really has no twists). There won’t be surprises, but the essence is not in them. The Silent Wife is an anatomy of a marriage, study of the relationship between the two people forming a single family. Why did not marriage work and why did it last for 20 years - these are the main questions the novel asks. What are the elements of a character the couple should have similar, and what should be different for a man and a woman to be able to hold for each other for two decades? Reading the novel, you notice that the marriage is not about love, the word "love" is almost not mentioned here. And you can notice on the example of Todd and Natasha that, maybe, if there is love, the marriage will not work. Anyway, man and woman have different concepts of love.

If the word "thriller" is confusing, "psychological" played out in two ways. The novel offers a look at the characters from different angles, so we can try to understand the motives of Jodi and Todd.

In this story, there are no positive and negative characters. It will not work - to blame Todd or hate Jodi for her act. Both he and she are not the most positive people. They're hard to love: the victim will be a predator, betrayer – a victim. The author focuses more on Jodi, but in the second half of the novel we learn more about Todd and more understand his inner self.

But "psychological" speaks not only about the psychological side of the book, but also about the profession of the heroine. The novel will show plenty of discussion about the theories of Freud, Jung and their followers. Jodi, as a psychologist, will analyze herself. Hence the second layer of the novel, on top of domestic one.

The Silent Wife reads quickly, but does not give quick answers. Silence is gold, but it can be Midas’ gold.