Overwhelming ... For all its boundless suffering, this is a novel of triumph ... Pained questions — no easier to answer now than then — greatly expand the scope and power of this perilous story told in richly poetic language. Running up against the limits of faith in the face of calamity, Annis eventually hammers out a relationship to the spirit world, complete with a rough-hewn existential philosophy that is both revolutionary and entirely consistent with the tools at her disposal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a young woman traumatized by enslavement has no interest in a divine presence that demands servitude, even ownership. Gratitude will have to suffice.
Among her talents, Ward can imagine and draw complex emotional and psychological lives for her adolescent characters ... Identifying Toni Morrison as an influence on Ward’s lyrical prose and ancestor invocation is fair, true, and too easy. Instead, we ought to read Ward as placing Greek mythology, ancient epic poets, Judeo-Christian narratives, and the system of Dante’s hell, adjacent to but not above her African American and African-descended gods. Her novels argue that these are interconnected, co-equal branches of practical magic.
A superb historical-fiction novel sprinkled with supernatural elements that pulls readers into the life of a slave on a long, painful journey ... While accurate, this description fails to communicate the depth of this novel as well as the multiplicity of layers in which it works. Angry, beautiful, raw, visceral, and heartfelt, Let Us Descend is the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours. This novel is a thing you can't help but to feel ... An uncomfortable read. Physical, psychological, and sexual violence were constants for slaves, and Ward doesn't shy away from any of it. In fact, Annis' months-long journey is recounted in exhausting detail ... As upsetting as it is beautiful and necessary. Ward's writing about slavery doesn't add anything new to the discussion, but her unique mix of historical fiction, supernatural elements, and gorgeous prose helps her carve out a special place in literature that deals with the subject. It's rare to have a historical novel that also feels timely, but this story pulls it off.
The depths of hell make up the very surface here, but all too often the novel comes across as just that: superficial. It aspires to the epic, but gets lost in a morass of allusions and strained metaphors, never living up to its promise to look deeply at our roots ... Language is an issue in this novel ... This novel felt like a draft, both overworked and under-edited.
Ward draws her readers into her familiar world, one where violence collides with strong family bonds, where motherhood is a place of fear and loss but also of strength and resilience. She then ushers us into something new for her, a genre novel mixing historical fiction with fantasy and using both to craft a powerful narrative of enslavement and resistance ... Ward delivers a moving defense of the strength and persistence of mother love.
There are losses. What the structure gains in allegorical force it loses in jeopardy and dilemma (her first novel may have some juvenile limitations, but it does jeopardy so well I often had to put it down, worried for her characters). Narrative engines – Annis’s mother training her in hand-to-hand combat, for instance – are set running but have nowhere to go. And some of the characters, especially later in the book, are pure plot devices. Ward doesn’t always avoid the trap of telling instead of showing, and the heightened language eventually brings diminishing returns. The spirit-Annis duets get repetitive, and Ward sometimes allows sonorousness and the imperatives of rhythm to trump sense. Increasingly I acknowledged the powers unleashed but was concerned by how little I felt for those on whom they acted. Though perhaps that is the point about hell – that it is not dynamic, but a static everlastingness that chars everything it touches.
Too many novels dawdle and sag in the middle, drooping between the tautness of an intriguing start and the firmness of a dramatic conclusion. The latest novel by Jesmyn Ward is a case in point ... Her new novel has clearly not been rushed, and yet when reading it I couldn’t help wishing – to adapt Blaise Pascal – that she had taken the time to make it shorter ... give the sense that Ward doesn’t trust her readers, and these parts of the book have the feel of a young adult novel ... For the first half of the book – until Annis is re-enslaved on a Louisiana sugar plantation – the extravagant claims made for Let Us Descend by the publisher on my advanced copy seemed wild. And yet in the final hundred pages Ward does stretch the reader more and the results are far more impressive.
The particular hell of slavery in the United States is well-represented in fiction, and Ward doesn’t attempt any kind of reinvention here, nor does she go the route of grand allegory. Instead, she employs her prodigious skills to craft a deeply moving and empathic story of one woman’s contention with her life’s constants ... This testament to Ward’s mastery of language should leave readers scrambling for a highlighter.
Brings Ward’s intimate knowledge of place to the pre-Civil War South, where her captivating narrator, teenage girl Annis, is enslaved ... Vivid observations and poetic interpretations.
Every time you think this novel is taking you places you’ve been before, Ward startles you with an image, a metaphor, a rhetorical surge that makes both Annis and her travails worth your attention. And admiration. Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.
