This is a beautiful, emotionally challenging book about what happens when the complex pull of family abuts the hard truths of the world: Life is not fair, some people can’t escape suffering, and misplaced solace, no matter how inviting, often leads to more pain.
These truths, depicted with both savage and elegant bluntness by Jesmyn Ward, made “Salvage the Bones” hard to read. As calamity upon calamity falls upon the 15-year-old narrator, her three brothers, and their father, a family less alive than surviving, I wondered, alternately angered by the injustice and saddened by the grinding inevitability of their fate, How can anyone live like this? How can we morally allow our neighbors to live like this?
For the family – daughter Esch, sons Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, and Daddy – the questions are existential. It is 1995, and their Mississippi bayou town sits in the sights of Hurricane Katrina. However, the coming threat remains secondary to the urgencies of daily life: Esch’s need for love, Skeetah’s dog-fighting dreams, Randall’s basketball fantasy. Only Daddy tries to prepare – until he cannot.
What Ward does so well is not blink before the storm. She infuses her powerful prose with blood. She highlights sibling tenderness and then stains it with feral immorality: stealing is sanctioned, as is drunkenness, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse. She offers no hope, only endurance – which, as it turns out, is the more useful tool.
“Salvage the Bones” rewards those who persist, those who endure its harder passages. The closing section of the book, when Katrina engulfs the town, is a potent literary punch, mighty words crafted in full flex. Along with roads and houses and land, the storm sweeps away pain. What it leaves behind are better angels who emerge under the clearing skies and discover within them yet another truth: Life goes on. Dawn brings a new day.
