Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Release date: 2008 / 324 pages

First line: “Henry and I dug the hole seven feet deep. Any shallower and tghe corpse was liable to come rising up during the next big flood: Howdy boys! Remember me?”

Synopsis (from jacket cover): “When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Laura does not have Henry’s love of rural life, and she struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, all the while under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law.”

Review: I read this novel for a custom kit order and boy am I glad. I could not put it down for two days, despite how painful it was throughout. And what a great choice for a book club, by the way.

The narrative is told as a flashback — the story opens with two brothers burying their father — and then the events leading to this act are told through the eyes of six narrators, individuals joined and trapped together by love as well as geography, time, and race.

The time period is shortly after the end of WWII, in Mississippi. The white characters are authentically pproducts of this time and place, and are therefore easy to dislike at times. But Jordan finds a way to make almost all of them sympathetic by the end.

The African-American characters are by far the most sympathetic, but are also complex and exceedingly interesting. Although it is obvious that the events are building to at least one act of violence, Jordan’s ending — told through the mind of Ronsel, a recently returned sargeant who fought under General Patton and struggles to re-acclimate to “the South’s ways” after experiencing a life of honor and respect overseas — is complex and unsettling, yet fits the novel perfectly.

One of the greatest acheivments of this novel is Jordan’s ability to create six distinct, authentic voices. Even without knowing who is “speaking,” it is obvious through the diction and prose. Laura, who I tended to align myself with because we are of the same age and are newly married, and because while she is an outsider to the way of life her husband has chosen, she is not as much of an outsider as the returning veterans or share-croppers, begins her story with rich, layered allusions to Dickens and Shakespeare that are hard to believe she would use by the end of the novel.

Each of the narrators are transformed by the end of the novel, except possibly Laura’s husband, and this contributes to the beauty of Jordan’s storytelling. My only caveat would be that I would have been curious to see through the eyes of “Pappy” — one of the few 2-dimensional characters in the novel.

Otherwise I strongly recommend this painful work of beauty — or beautiful work of pain — and believe book clubs would particularly appreciate it…

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