Book Review: Salvage the Bones

"Salvage the Bones" is only Jesmyn Ward's second novel and it is stunning.  Not only is the story compelling in a tough way but the descriptions are sometimes so true that you read them over a couple of times just to set the picture in your mind. This is not an easy book to read, it doesn't have a smooth, lyrical cadence.  It is choppy, at times abrupt, intense and hard-edged.  In the beginning, the reader has to work at liking it, or at least accepting it and continuing on.  There were passages that I couldn't read, specifically about dog fights, that were too gruesome even for me. But those are balanced by beauty and honesty:  "Skeetah stands in the sun, the only boy in the yellow clearing who braves the light with the dogs. He ignores us, looks past us off into the woods, still as China at his side, who ignores us and looks off as well, standing, never sitting.  I wonder if he has trained her to do this, to stand at his side, to not dirty even her haunches with sitting so that they gleam.  China is white as the sand that will become a pearl, Skeetah as black as an oyster, but they stand as one before these boys who do not know what it means to love a dog the way the Skeetah does."

The story takes place in a small, poor hamlet in Louisiana ten days before Hurricane Katrina destroys the place.  The narrator is a young teenage girl, Esch, who lives with her father and three brothers in a life ringed by poverty and hardship.  She is a girl surrounded by men, trying to navigate a world that is in many ways a dead-end.  One of the central characters is a white pit bull named China and as the book opens she is whelping her first litter of puppies.  China is a strong metaphor for everything this family is desparate for:  safety, comfort, hope and a future. 

The family ties are mercurial, as family ties often are: tight and strong when forced but loose and careless when anger and resentment, fear and hunger show up at the table.  The community this family lives in revolves around survival, dog fights and razor sharp teenage sullenness. The upcoming storm is at first barely heard, just a shadow in the background, no one but the father paying any attention to its potential.  As it approaches and as it becomes apparent that it will be a Category 5 hurricane, its awful presence grows. The wind picks up, the kids try to board up the windows of their shack of a house, they scavenge for food to last a few days.  When Katrina finally arrives, they huddle upstairs, trying to wait it out.  "The sun will not show. It must be out there, over the furious hurricane beating itself against the coastline like China at the tin door of the shed when she wants to get out.  But here we are caught in the hour where the sun is hidden beyond the trees but hasn't escaped over the horizon, when it is coming and going, when light comes from everywhere and nowhere, when everything is gray."

The last section of the book, as the water rises through the house, upstairs, forcing them to crawl to the attic and then break through to the roof, is mesmerizing and frightening: "Light floods the flooded attic, close as a coffin.  Randall grabs Junior, who swings around and clings to his back, his small hands tight as clothespins, and Randall climbs out and into the hungry maw of the storm.  It is terrible. It is the flailing wind that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt.  It is the rain, which stings like stones...."

Again, this is a very, very good book.  Tough, gritty, unrelenting and beautiful, it deserves to be read.  This honest portrayal of poverty and violence, family and survival is one you will not forget.  I personally cannot wait for Jesmyn Ward's next book.

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