zenithblue (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zenithblue) wrote2007-02-12 09:11 pm
zenithblue) wrote2007-02-12 09:11 pm
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Getting Mother's Body: A Review
By the time Suzan-Lori Parks even sat down to write Getting Mother's Body, her very first novel, she'd already won the Pulitzer and a handful of Obies for her playwriting. What a bitch.
No, not really.
Getting Mother's Body is the story of Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of six-years-dead Willa Mae Beede, a con-artist and blues-woman who lived fast and hard. Living dirt poor with her aunt and uncle in a crap ass town in Texas (circa 1963), Billy is also carrying the illegitimate child of a married man. Along about the time she finds herself in need of a solution for this problem, a letter comes in the mail: Willa Mae's grave is about to be dug up to make room for a supermarket, off in Arizona. Of much greater interest than Willa Mae's body are her jewels. According to family lore, Willa Mae was buried with a set of pearls and a diamond ring, worth more than enough to pay for an abortion (or, as far as the other family members are concerned, buy a new fake leg, build a new church, etc.). With that treasure in mind, Billy steals the truck of her mother's former lover Dill Smiles, and with her aunt and uncle set out to get that treasure (and of course their dearly departed). Hot on their tail is Dill with shotgun in tow, aiming to get her truck back and prevent that digging.
If this sounds like a downer, you really should pick it up and flip through. There is an unbelievable ebullience to these characters, a wild energy to the prose. These are characters who laugh as much as they sing the blues. Watching Billy con her way across the highways, watching her follow her mother (and decide just how far she's aiming to follow her mother), is moving, but it's also just fun. The girl is a charmer, and you the reader are one of her marks.
It's obvious early on that Parks had her start in playwriting; each chapter is a different first-person perspective from a different character, and they read like a collection of monologues sometimes. Sometimes the external world seems lost as they explain themselves. You have the character, alone on the stage, lit by one spotlight. This is not a flaw (though I am curious to see what she'll do with another novel, if she writes a second). The interweaving and overlapping between all these lonely voices creates something bigger, an interference pattern of heartbreak and hilarity. And then there's Willa Mae; being dead doesn't stop her from singing the blues, from speaking more clearly to the sorrow of the living than the living themselves can afford to do (obviously some Faulknerian influence is at work here).
Set at the height of the civil rights movement , there's an awareness that the socio-political action is elsewhere (a number of neighbors are carpooling to Washington to march: "Warshington, D.C., got all that humidity," says one character, getting her hair done, and another responds: "They shoulda took that into account when they planned the March...Seems to be, when they planned that March, they shoulda thought about how all that water was gonna be hanging in the air." "They was thinking about marching to the Capitol," says the other. "The Capitol's in Warshington."). The lost souls of this novel are on another type of history-shattering journey, one that will force them to confront not their political history but their familial history. And as I always seem to mention, of course the two aren't easily differentiated from one another, and there's no simplistic analogy to make between the March on Washington and the trip to dig up the bones of one's dead mother. The only thing that seems obvious to me is that both are quests to define the self in relief against history.
Compassionate and raucous and smart and really just a shitload of fun, it's a great time eavesdropping as the characters speak their respective pieces. Parks has a great understanding for the spoken word and the rhetorical powers of the colloquial voice. The characters don't so much speak as sing out all their joys and sorrows.
No, not really.
Getting Mother's Body is the story of Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of six-years-dead Willa Mae Beede, a con-artist and blues-woman who lived fast and hard. Living dirt poor with her aunt and uncle in a crap ass town in Texas (circa 1963), Billy is also carrying the illegitimate child of a married man. Along about the time she finds herself in need of a solution for this problem, a letter comes in the mail: Willa Mae's grave is about to be dug up to make room for a supermarket, off in Arizona. Of much greater interest than Willa Mae's body are her jewels. According to family lore, Willa Mae was buried with a set of pearls and a diamond ring, worth more than enough to pay for an abortion (or, as far as the other family members are concerned, buy a new fake leg, build a new church, etc.). With that treasure in mind, Billy steals the truck of her mother's former lover Dill Smiles, and with her aunt and uncle set out to get that treasure (and of course their dearly departed). Hot on their tail is Dill with shotgun in tow, aiming to get her truck back and prevent that digging.
If this sounds like a downer, you really should pick it up and flip through. There is an unbelievable ebullience to these characters, a wild energy to the prose. These are characters who laugh as much as they sing the blues. Watching Billy con her way across the highways, watching her follow her mother (and decide just how far she's aiming to follow her mother), is moving, but it's also just fun. The girl is a charmer, and you the reader are one of her marks.
It's obvious early on that Parks had her start in playwriting; each chapter is a different first-person perspective from a different character, and they read like a collection of monologues sometimes. Sometimes the external world seems lost as they explain themselves. You have the character, alone on the stage, lit by one spotlight. This is not a flaw (though I am curious to see what she'll do with another novel, if she writes a second). The interweaving and overlapping between all these lonely voices creates something bigger, an interference pattern of heartbreak and hilarity. And then there's Willa Mae; being dead doesn't stop her from singing the blues, from speaking more clearly to the sorrow of the living than the living themselves can afford to do (obviously some Faulknerian influence is at work here).
Set at the height of the civil rights movement , there's an awareness that the socio-political action is elsewhere (a number of neighbors are carpooling to Washington to march: "Warshington, D.C., got all that humidity," says one character, getting her hair done, and another responds: "They shoulda took that into account when they planned the March...Seems to be, when they planned that March, they shoulda thought about how all that water was gonna be hanging in the air." "They was thinking about marching to the Capitol," says the other. "The Capitol's in Warshington."). The lost souls of this novel are on another type of history-shattering journey, one that will force them to confront not their political history but their familial history. And as I always seem to mention, of course the two aren't easily differentiated from one another, and there's no simplistic analogy to make between the March on Washington and the trip to dig up the bones of one's dead mother. The only thing that seems obvious to me is that both are quests to define the self in relief against history.
Compassionate and raucous and smart and really just a shitload of fun, it's a great time eavesdropping as the characters speak their respective pieces. Parks has a great understanding for the spoken word and the rhetorical powers of the colloquial voice. The characters don't so much speak as sing out all their joys and sorrows.
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BTW, the phrase "unfuckwithable" is one of the most glorious in the English language. Right up there with "girl-boner." That sticker is going somewhere front and center. And I love the CD! You rock.