The Nature of Things

Back in October, I read Jesmyn Ward's latest book, Sing, Unburied, Sing , set in the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage and the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. It occurred to me then that I had never read this earlier book, also set in Bois Sauvage, also a National Book Award winner. Ward seems to be making a habit of that. I thought the book I read in October was amazing, but, if anything, this one is even better. It certainly packs even more of an emotional wallop. At least it did for me. I found that I could more easily empathize with these characters. The story centers around the Batiste family, a dirt poor - literally - African-American family living on land on the bayou outside of Bois Sauvage  inherited from grandparents. The family comprises a widowed father, three sons, and a daughter. Our main protagonist, the one whose eyes we look through, is the daughter, Esch. She is the third child of the family, now fourteen years old. The difficult birth of ...

What serendipitous timing. The day after I started reading her latest book, the announcement came that Jesmyn Ward was the recipient of one of this year's MacArthur "Genius" grants. Having now finished the book, I concur with MacArthur's assessment. Jesmyn Ward is a genius. When this book first came out and was reviewed, I remember reading that Ward kept a copy of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech hanging above her desk. In that speech, he admonished writers to write from the heart and to wrestle with the immortal truths of "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." It's clear that she has fully internalized the message of those words. In Sing, Unburied, Sing , she has ticked each of those boxes of the immortal truths. In this book as in her 2011 National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones (still sitting in my reading queue waiting to be read), Ward takes us to Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, that Gulf Coast town ...