Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

Granny held tightly to the roof outside the rolled-down window and muttered something in Cherokee that Justine couldn't understand. Lula's shouting only goaded John Joseph. He pressed the car faster up the big hill into town. The wind whipped in the windows, and Justine forgot for a minute what would happen when they got home and the real questions and the crying bean. She couldn't know how in a few months she'd be flooded with a crippling love for another human being that would wound he for the rest of her days, how her insides would be wiped clean, burdened, and saved by a kid who'd come kicking into this world with Justine's own blue eyes, a full head of black hair, and lips Justine would swear looked just like a rosebud. For now, that little car filled with three--almost four--generations flew. And when they dropped over the top of the hill, Justine threw her hands up, her mouth agape in wonder.

Justine lives in the Sequoyah Hills of Oklahoma with her mother Lula, a fanatic Pentecostal, and her grandmother, who keeps the old ways of her Cherokee upbringing alive. She's not allowed to bare her arms or legs, but that doesn't keep her from being victimized--it never does, does it--when she's raped by an older Choctaw man at the age of fifteen. Her daughter Reney grows up ping-ponging across the Red River between the oil-scarred fields of North Texas where Justine's cowboy husband Pitch lives, and Oklahoma's Indian Country, where--I'm sorry, but it's a cursed phrase to type--four generations of powerful women reside over one roof.

That's selling Crooked Hallelujah short: it's never glib, but I found it often stepped right up to the edge of cloying. To its credit, the novel is attentive to the ways that Lula's Holiness Church traumatizes Justine and Reney in turn, even as it holds that the power of love between mothers and daughters is sacrosanct. I was interested in the way charismatic Christianity colors the dynamic between these women, for good and bad, and veils in some way the connection to the Cherokee heritage represented by the aging Granny. A healthy respect for the ways of the heartland is at the heart of the novel, and not just the ranchers, cowboys, and oilhands: several key scenes take place at a Dairy Queen, and everyone seems to constantly be drinking Dr. Pepper.

But mostly I found Crooked Hallelujah to be too scattered to really enjoy: third-person narratives are interrupted by first-person ones, and I had a hard time telling Justine and Reney in these sections, and even sometimes Lula. But I absolutely did not want to be distracted by the first-person narratives of ancillary characters, even when, like Pitch's callous, aging father, they provide some of the novel's more challenging and interesting moments. I couldn't stand the section from the point of view of Justine's neighbor, a wayward young man who loses his mother before becoming fast friends with a lesbian couple who move in down the street. What's that about?

An even more baffling choice--although perhaps the best choice in the novel--comes at the end, when the novel suddenly becomes a work of dystopian fiction. The hyperrealism, the sentimentalism, give way to a vision of ecological collapse: the oil fields of North Texas where an older Justine is still living are beset by earthquakes, fires, horde of locusts. These things have their foreshadowing in more mundane catastrophes--a tornado and a brushfire--in the book's earlier chapters, but nothing prepared me for the final chapter, in which Reney and her new husband must decide whether to force Justine to leave her home, which has become the epicenter of the End of Days. Is it a testament to the power of love to overcome everything? No, it deserves more credit than that. But it does open up, at the last available moment, a possibility for what the novel might have been, a possibility I think I might have liked more.