While “Grief Cottage” and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” are not mysteries, each contains references to crimes. The books relate to the fall-out from these crimes.
The mysteries of life are often interwoven with thoughts of death, however much we try to suppress them.
Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury USA, 336 pages, $27 (c2017)
After living on the edge of poverty with his mother for most of his life, Marcus finds himself elevated a few economic notches when his mother dies in a car accident. He is sent to live with his great aunt by the sea in South Carolina. His mother providentially had paid for life insurance for herself. As a result, Marcus no longer has to worry excessively about money, but a small lifetime of parsimonious habits are hard to reverse.
Great-aunt Charlotte is a successful, but vaguely impecunious, artist of sea and seaside paintings. She has lived alone for quite a while and, as in the best children’s stories in which a small child goes to live with an distant relative, is grumpy, dismissive, and uncommunicative. We know that if this were a children’s tale, she would come around, fiercely love her nephew, throw her arms in the air and finally embrace what is left of her life. Close to the end of the book, it becomes obvious that this is not a children’s book but could be, yeeeaah, stretched to the sub-genre of “Young Adult.”
At a not-so-distant point in the past, Marcus injured his best friend in a fight. Psychological care was mandated, and Marcus and his mother had to move to another town. Before that happened, however, Marcus and his friend would discuss what they would do if they met a ghost.
As pudgy, forlorn Marcus attempts to begin life in his aunt’s seaside town by rambling along the shore, he finds a tumbledown house with a tragic past. A family of vacationing outsiders died in Hurricane Hazel (1954), their bodies never found. Fifty years later, Marcus stares into the depths of the rotting home and thinks he sees the ghost of the family’s young son.
I’ve gone on too long about a book which is not strictly a mystery, but I was favorably struck by Gail Godwin’s characterizations, kindly perceptions, and depiction of a smart young boy with a big burden to shoulder. Old crimes eventually surface and catalyze the emotionally intense last moments of the book.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Scribner, 304 pages, $26 (c2017)
Ghostly and spiritual presences abound in this profound literary excavation into the difficulties of an African-American family in Mississippi. You can say that their story is the tip of the iceberg that is the history of the South. The ripples of slavery, including its demon spawn of racism and bigotry, strike even centuries down the line. Jesmyn Ward wrote this book before our nation began its most recent conversation about racism, bigotry, prejudice, the shiny re-packaging of the Civil War, and what it means to be human.
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his three-year-old sister Kayla, his mother Leonie, white father Michael, grandfather Pop, and grandmother Mam are the central characters. Some of them can see ghosts, make healing herbal concoctions, talk to the voodoo spirits. But what does that spirit world mean to them, provide for them, demand of them?
Although the narrative ball is passed among a few of the characters, including one ghost, Ward never loses her strong and provocative central voice. The dialogue reflects the characters’ external world, but the narrative voices are Ward’s.
There are crimes and misdemeanors aplenty, but the biggest crime is how the system that should protect all is sometimes turned against the most vulnerable.
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