First I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. She starts in the middle. The only way to tell this story.
So there she is, the narrator, meandering through college in 1996. On the first page she drops the bombshell that her brother left her life ten years earlier, and her sister seventeen. The once middle child now a de facto only child. We are with her in the lonely center of a mystery from the start. With just that hint of the beginning and the question of how it will end.
Fowler captures the nuances of family dynamics and human relationships. "My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family." And like that, we're off.
Beside Ourselves is a book to read on vacation. Rosemary lands in jail within the first couple of pages. From that point on, the drama, twists, surprises and mystery pull the reader in. I sat on the sofa, knees tucked under a blanket, and lost myself in the story. There is humor, great kindness in the writing, and tragedy. Tears snuck up on me before the end. The story looks with raw honesty at the complex relationships between humans and animals. No preaching. No answers really. But it raises some painful questions.
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves stayed with me for days.
I let it soak in. And then, after a decent time lapse (so as not to be disrespectful), I picked up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin.
By comparison, it started out slow. The reviews on the back cover said "the kind of novel that you just can't stop reading... just one more page, you tell yourself, just one more page..." Yet compared with Fowler's opening madcap ride to jail, Franklin's story began as imperceptibly as a sunrise.
Oh, he mentions the missing Rutherford girl, and a monster - in the first sentence. But then leans back into a slow Mississippi drawl about nature, the landscape and the weather. He paints with a fine-tipped brush. "At the edge of the porch several ferns hung from the eave, his mother's wind chime lodged in one like a flung puppet. He set his coffee on the rail and went to disentangle the chime's slender pipes from the leaves." Chicken pens with "speckled droppings and wet feathers", "storm clouds like a billowing mountain" to the north, "tapping the razor on the edge of the sink, whiskers peppered around the drain more gray than black" and we, the reader, slowly, ever so slowly, filling with a sense of quiet empathy and dread.
Crooked Letter cast its deep magic. It built up slow but full of power. Eventually it overtook my waking thoughts. Two boys, one black, one white. Tragedies unrecognized from a child's eyes. Just the way it is, something to make into a playground of some kind. Kids will find a way to learn about the world. The two boys played together in the fields and wood, and did not acknowledge each other at school, the place where their race mattered.
Then a girl disappeared. The last known person to see her was 17 year old Larry, the awkward white boy. The odd kid, the guy who was always a little strange. Decades passed. Decades without a body or any solid evidence. Decades of solitude for Larry, ostracized by the small community. Year after year of chicken tending and clouds rolling in, daily rituals and long silence. The black boy did a stint in the Marines and eventually returned to the community to serve as deputy Sheriff. To serve as deputy and to solve the winding, twisting, mesmerizing mystery. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Indeed.
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