Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations: where we expect violence, she gives us sweetness. When we brace for beauty, she gives us blood … Best of all, she gives us a singular heroine who breaks the mold of the typical teenage female protagonist. Esch isn’t plucky or tomboyish. She’s squat, sulky and sexual. But she is beloved — her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior are fine and strong; they brawl and sacrifice and steal for her and each other. And Esch is in bloom … For all its fantastical underpinnings, Salvage the Bones is never wrong when it comes to suffering. Sorrow and pain aren’t presented as especially ennobling. They exist to be endured — until the next Katrina arrives to ‘cut us to the bone.’
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy … [Ward’s] description of the storm, the blind terror, the force of wind and water, is filled with visceral panic. What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.
The ‘black heart of Bois Sauvage’ isn't all rotten...It's also a place of unearthly beauty, a wild wood planted with magnolias and live oaks. Esch and the boys run in packs, swimming in the black waters of the Pit, their feet permanently dusted with orange dirt. It's the kind of home that leaves its mark on your skin, and though they might fight, the siblings' bond is unbreakably tight … There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth.
The writer Jesmyn Ward, however, has not entangled herself in the politics of the catastrophe...Katrina is portrayed strictly as a primal explosion, a thunderbolt hurled by a punishing god … Ms. Ward reminds us a little too insistently of the Medea story; the allusion begins to seem less symbolic than instructional. And while her dense, descriptive prose has many lovely touches, it can also turn humid with melodrama … The novel's power comes from the dread of the approaching storm and a pair of violent climaxes.
As a narrator, rendering the story in the present tense, Esch is observant, poetic and often given to reminiscing about her mother who died in childbirth … For the most part, Ward’s lyricism is fresh and sharp, but on some occasions it risks stalling the narrative in a mishmash of simile that undermines rather than strengthens the voice … On the other hand, when the story turns dramatic the reader is swept up in the tense rawness of its action. There are scenes of dog fights, for instance, in which the reader is absorbed even while being repulsed by the descriptions of bared teeth and tearing flesh. Likewise, in the climatic scene in which the hurricane’s winds and waters threaten the characters, the language is efficient and the action is present.
Jesmyn insists on unsettling the predictable, and for Esch, who is reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology throughout the turmoil of the novel, the comparison that makes sense to her is with Medea … To see Esch as Medea, or Reese in ‘Cattle Haul’ as Odysseus is to see them as something more than just characters with ‘hardscrabble lives.’ Is to see their lives as something more than trivial—they are beautiful as the Greek gods were beautiful; they are arrogant; they are humane; they are fools; they are flawed. And Salvage the Bones, to my mind, isn’t so much about escape as it is about belonging.
Bones begins in disaster, and endures cataclysm. Early scenes – of pups arriving, some of them dying, of the shooting and gutting of a squirrel, of desperate, bloody dog fights and limb-risking efforts to steal supplies, of friends and family striking out in crazed efforts to survive in sweat and dirt and steam-heat, of characters getting bitten and sliced and broken – are full-frontal, graphic. This novel's got no time for comfort … The bitterness of having nothing, prospects of nothing – so inexorable and crushing that a kind of madness descends, causing the principals to turn on each other as well as fight to protect each other - soaks these pages. A reader can taste it. It's astonishingly brave.
Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor. It's told by a teenage girl, Esch, whose late-summer thoughts turn to Greek myths and her neglectful lover, Manny … That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail. Randall and Esch have served as Junior's default parents, raising him from a baby when they themselves were only children. Esch admires Skeetah but watches his devotion to China with unarticulated envy; the love he has for the dog is more than Manny has for her.
Salvage the Bones scrapes at us in the voice of Esch Batiste, 14. She lives on Top Ramen and the occasional wild squirrel, shared in a backwoods home called the Pit. The novel begins with a raw birth of pit bull puppies, then, in the second paragraph, Esch mentions that her mother died laboring ‘under her own bare burning bulb,’ seven years ago … Ward's pacing around the hurricane is exquisite – we nearly forget its impending savagery. The Batistes' shared sacrifice is moving, made more so by their occasional shirking of sacrifice. Ward allows the letdowns integral to family life to play their part.
It is a lyrical and largely successful tale of the ties that bind and the experiences that strain them … Although Esch narrates, it’s Skeetah who is the heart of this novel, devoted as a lover to China, so attuned to her needs that he barely notices the squalor around him, or the crisis his father is heading for, or the way some of his friends are using his sister. Passionately committed to a path that will keep him wedged firmly in poverty and ignorance, Skeetah is the book’s tragic hero.
It’s to Ward’s credit that Salvage The Bones unfolds along Esch’s sightlines, not those of an outsider peering into her window. And on top of her more pedestrian worries, like how to sneak extra food when there’s barely enough to go around, Hurricane Katrina casts a meaningfully menacing shadow, operating above the gimmick level … Yet Ward still walks the line between depicting the family’s misery and, in mining it for poetic contrast, reveling in its messiness...Avoiding the sentimentality that might have lit stories like Esch’s in other accounts is a desirable goal, but Salvage The Bones’ accumulation of detail tips the scale on the side of wretchedness and takes with it the humanity of its protagonist.
Esch traces in the minutiae of every moment of every scene of her life the thin lines between passion and violence, love and hate, life and death, and though her voice threatens to overpower the story, it does a far greater service to the book by giving its cast of small lives a huge resonance.
An evocative novel of a family torn apart by grief, hardship, misunderstanding and, soon, the biggest storm any of them has ever seen … Naturally, in a situation where the children are the adults and vice versa, something has to give—and it does, straight in the maw of Katrina. Yet the fury of the storm yields a kind of redemption, a scenario that could dissolve into mawkishness, but that Ward pulls off without a false note.
