Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The boy is River's. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn't carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River's by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River's: indomitable as cypress. He is River's child.

Young Jojo has grown up hearing his grandfather's stories of Parchman, a notorious Mississippi prison. Jojo's fascination with them stems in part from his admiration for his grandfather's resilience and in part because his father, a white man named Michael, is at Parchman. On the day that Michael is to get out of prison, Jojo's neglectful mother Leonie piles him and his sister Kayla into a car to head north, into the Delta. They come back not only with Michael but the spirit of Richie, a young boy Jojo recognizes from his grandfather's stories about Parchman. Richie recognizes Jojo, and attaches himself to him, out of a vague sense that there is some business to settle with Jojo's grandfather, who failed in his attempts to keep Richie from being killed at Parchman. Their return puts Richie's ghost on a collision course with that of Given, Leonie's brother killed in a "hunting accident" by Michael's cousin, as well as Leonie's mother, who is busy ritually preparing for her own death.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is, ostensibly, about the reverberations of cruelty and racism into the present day. The story is not really Parchman (although it probably should have been), but the way that the violence of Parchman resounds in the lives of people who did not live through it, like Leonie and Jojo. The presence of the ghosts, who, we are made to understand, stick around because they experienced terrible, violent deaths--something Leonie's mother is determined not to let happen to herself--and become basic, literalized representations of the ways that racist violence still "haunts" the people of Mississippi. The malevolent ghost of Richie is eventually banished in two ways: first, Jojo's grandfather has to complete the story he has only partially told Jojo, and confront the shame of his failure to keep Richie alive. This is the novel as therapy, a representation of the idea that trauma can be healed by revealing and narrating. (In this, of course, Sing, Unburied, Sing is not alone; this idea is core to so many books these days.) Then, when Richie tries to snatch the ghost of the grandmother, it's Given who has to scare him off. So our ghosts haunt us, but maybe they protect us, too.

I hated the experience of reading this book. I found it turgid, mawkish, sentimental, humorless, overwritten, convoluted, and at times incomprehensible. At least half of it is a long, drawn-out "road trip" novel that moves like swamp water. The focus of this first half seems to be mostly on what a terrible mother Leonie is; when Kayla gets badly sick, it's Jojo who has to look after her--but this sickness is never really explained or resolved, and as such seems to justify Leonie's contention that she just has motion sickness. The conclusion, by contrast, comes quickly and confusingly, drawing the threads of dead Richie, dead Given, dying grandmother, etc., together in a way that feels badly forced. Despite a few aborted attempts to capture a regional voice, the prose is unrelentingly cloying. (The ghost of a teen that died 50 years ago describes Jojo as "indomitable as a cypress?") But most significantly, I felt that this book had very little meaningful to say about racism and violence. It's bad, and it haunts us. OK. Fine.