SALVAGE THIS WORLD, by Michael Farris Smith
In “Salvage This World,” Michael Farris Smith bolsters his reputation as an intoxicating literary stylist. For Southern writers (Smith is from Mississippi), a comparison to Cormac McCarthy can be both an honor and an act of oppression, but McCarthy is an unavoidable point of reference for the bleak elegance of Smith’s prose. Besides the strict ban on hyphens (“dumbeyed,” “dewdrenched,” “faceflat”), you’ll find sentences engineered to rise and rise in pitch, as though surprised at the size of their own ambitions:
Wade watched the house shrink in the rearview mirror and he tried to remember this land in the sunshine and he tried to remember her sitting on the porch and painting her toenails with her belly growing and he tried to remember the cornstalks being tall and green and he tried to remember anything that hadn’t faded in the muted tones of storm and solitude and none of it would come.
The solemn, rhythmic tone is well employed in service of the sodden, gray setting: “barely governed communities across Louisiana and Mississippi” where a string of storms (we’re told there’s no longer an off-season to the hurricanes) has cast a post-apocalyptic pall over the land. Strip malls and elementary schools are abandoned and kudzu-swallowed. It’s always raining or about to. Crops are drowned, given up on. It’s a Deep South where hospitality feels impossible, from which everyone with means and sense has departed, a society where any vehicle on the road might have a bound (if alive) or bagged (if dead) human as its cargo.
In this environment, families aren’t so much broken as they are razed, and the emotional center of Smith’s book is a portrait of a father (Wade) full of regret and a daughter (Jessie) full of resentment who, through the malignant bumbling of the daughter’s love interest, are afforded an unexpected second chance in each other’s lives. Jessie’s mother, Wade’s wife, died in childbirth, and this disaster, instead of bringing father and daughter closer, drove them apart, largely because of Wade’s inability to bring himself to speak of the deceased. The flashbacks that capture Wade’s parental failures are touching, and Jessie’s recalcitrance, which the reader wants her to shed for her own good, is real and frustrating.
A more immediate threat to Wade and Jessie, as well as Jace, Jessie’s toddler son, is a religious con woman named Elser, who goes about in a hearse, has many henchmen and seems involved in rackets more nefarious and lucrative than using the Bible to swindle people out of their last dollars. She’s a villain the way a shark is a villain, and plenty scary, but the character chumming the water is Holt, Jessie’s aforementioned love interest.
Holt jump-starts the plot by stealing an important-seeming set of keys from Elser. Holt doesn’t know what the keys unlock, but he wants them. He’s an intentionally mysterious character, everyone’s worst enemy (including his own), the kind of man readers ruefully enjoy watching thud through life and grab at shiny things (like keys) without feeling compelled to root for him.
While Smith’s enthralling narrative talents are plentifully on display in this book, I did find the dialogue a slight letdown. My expectation to receive deeper access to the idiosyncratic personalities of the characters often went unfulfilled, the exchanges too brief or too focused on already-known information. I kept hoping the dialogue would supply avenues for the characters to distinguish themselves from the overarching prickly, reticent demeanor that seems to spring right from the dismal setting and infect everyone in the novel, but it was rarely equal to that task.
All in all, “Salvage This World” is a bruising, bracing read by a hell of a writer. If you consider life too short for uninspired sentences or nondescript locales, this book is for you.
John Brandon is the author of five books, most recently the novel “Ivory Shoals.”
SALVAGE THIS WORLD | By Michael Farris Smith | 261 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $28
