Southern tragedy is a page-turner

I am a slow reader. It takes me forever to conquer the 100-page milestone, and forget about textbook assignments.

But Hillary Jordan’s debut novel “Mudbound” (published by Algonquin Books) took me two days to finish. I literally couldn’t put it down. I stuffed it into my purse so I could read it on my lunch break, when I was early to meetings, and at stoplights.  

This southern tragedy doesn’t fit the stereotypes of a southern Gothic novel, but it doesn’t forget the southern literature tradition, hearkening back to style of William

Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” with multiple narrators explaining the tale of a burial.
It begins with two brothers, Henry and Jamie McAllan, burying their father’s murdered corpse into a slave grave in Mississippi mud. Neither appears to be the killer, and neither appears to care about finding the person who did it.

After this first chapter, Laura, the boys’ mother, “must start at the beginning” and tells the story of how her family came to be on a farm from her more sophisticated and seemingly lonely life in Memphis. Through a comparison between herself and a black sharecropper’s wife, Florence Jackson, the role of the woman in a household is deliberately examined.

Meanwhile, one of the Jackson’s sons, Ronsel, returns after serving in World War II; he “went off to fight for (his) country and came back to find it hadn’t changed a bit.”

Unaccustomed to the racism and Jim Crow laws of Mississippi after living abroad and serving his country, he is unwilling, in some ways, to accept the lot dealt to him. He wants to help his parents get out of debt but has one foot out the door.

Ronsel and Jamie are World War II vets, and are known for their sparkle or “shine.”

They are charismatic characters who are irresistible to women and seem bound for somewhere outside the Mississippi of their origins. But this friendship becomes too much for a small group of white men to bear.

The setting of the farm, “Mudbound” serves as a place where they are literally and figuratively stuck and sometimes even separated from the outside world when it floods.

This book is a story of compromise: compromised xships and compromised futures.

It is also a love story about one man’s love for the land, a woman who is love-hungry, a man’s love for the bottle and yet another’s love for one too distant. It is the story of two families: how far mothers’ love for their children extends and how far-reaching hatred can actually fold in on itself.

These two families, the McAllans and the Jacksons, learn about the dark sides and the humanity of one another. Though racism, womanhood and love versus romance are thick threads throughout the book, possibly the strongest theme and the biggest question this novel struggles with is that of redemption: What does it take? Is it just? And who can be redeemed?

This book is a must-read. Though a sense of inevitability or even fate pervades the text, the narrative is never predictable, and I always kept my index finger behind the next page, ready to flip as the story and lives unravel.

I hope Jordan sticks with the South; her potential is as great as that of Harper Lee and her story just as fresh.