Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 13 JANUARY 2012

Until now, the literary response to Hurricane Katrina has been muted: Dave Eggers’s work of non-fiction Zeitoun received praise, but Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is possibly the first truly notable work of fiction to deal with the subject. Set during the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, this National Book Award-winning novel is a difficult read. This is partly because Ward’s lyricism is sometimes at the expense of clarity but it is also because the circumstances in which the action takes place are so relentlessly tough, and the reader knows throughout, of course, that something even worse is to come.

Ward’s fourteen-year-old narrator, Esch, is as appealing as she is surprising. She is part of a family for whom there is always “more rice than salt in the shaker”. In spite of her boyish clothes, she lost her virginity at twelve and is now pregnant. Although her three brothers and emotionally absent father seem barely to register Esch’s femininity (let alone her pregnancy), her narration is charged through with delight and terror at her own womanhood. Crucially, just before the hurricane arrives, Esch wears her dead mother’s bobby pins and we are made aware, through this pathetic gesture, how much the loss of her mother has cost. The only other female at home is China, her brother Skeetah’s prized pitbull, who is worn down by motherhood, her breast mauled in a fight. The hurricane is also female and Esch’s hard-drinking father says of it that it is “Like the worst, a woman”.

In these circumstances, it is no wonder that Esch seeks out other feminine role models, and some of the most moving parts of the book describe her fixation with Greek mythology, and particularly with Medea. Esch has almost no language, other than Medea’s speeches, to describe the yearning and possessiveness she feels towards the boy who got her pregnant, and it is a testament to Ward’s skill that the love this young character expresses should seem shocking and yet, also, redemptive. In spite of the emotional and literal poverty of her life, Esch is capable of great tenderness and devotion.

This is an unsettling, visceral book, but the reader is nonetheless unprepared for the horror of the hurricane when it arrives. This is when Ward’s prose shows itself to be equal to her ambition. Pregnant Esch and her family cling to a tree when their house begins to flood. “I look back to see Daddy hurtling through the air. He hits the branch so hard with his torso that his body jacknifes and his face is almost in the water.” Odd loyalties spring up during the crisis – Esch is shown solidarity by a childhood friend while her brother Skeetah reveals, somewhat tragicomically, that his loyalty lies with his dog. This is a flawed and occasionally overblown book but no one can doubt its power, nor that of its odd, tenacious heroine.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement