|
A satisfying tale of community and quirkiness
By Lucia Perillo Lucia Perillo is the author of the poetry collection "The Oldest Map With the Name America" and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000 Published October 27, 2002
Q Road More than a decade ago, in Harper's magazine, novelist Tom Wolfe infamously published an essay bemoaning the lack of contemporary American novels that revealed the interactions of a whole community, as in, say, the Victorian novels of Dickens. To fill the gap, Wolfe gave us Bonfire of the Vanities, a big book about New York City gripped in the greed of the 1990s. Q Road, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, also takes on this ambitious enterprise--presenting a community in its entirety--except that her setting is the vanishing farmland of Michigan, and she brings her novel home at fewer than 300 pages. Campbell bites off a smaller chunk than Wolfe, but she chews it no less thoughtfully, and in the end the meal is a satisfying one for readers interested in the quirks of rural life. Not only does Campbell limit her slice of life to just one town--a town with the anywhere and nowhere name of Greenland--she also limits herself to the neighborhood that sits along one road--the Q Road that gives the book its name. Further narrowing the field, she restricts her action to what takes place over a 24-hour period, though her story reaches into the region's past and toward its future. It concerns in particular one married couple, George Harland and Rachel Crane. George farms a swath of fertile river valley land, having inherited the farm through the matrilineage of his grandmother, Henrietta Harland. When the novel opens, George's first wife has decamped from the rigors of farm life, and the gun-toting, 17-year-old Rachel Crane has signed on in her stead. Rachel has entered into this May-December marriage to fulfill her ambition of owning land, though there is also a healthy dose of pheromones in operation here, which may explain George's interest. In fact the people who live along Q Road have a penchant for choosing dirt over mattresses as the substrate for their lovemaking, and maybe this is because the land itself is described as horny. These are fields that "thrust their fertility up at a man, begging him, `Plow me, sow me, reap me.' " The lives of many people are threaded by Q Road's straightaway: a woman obsessed with UFOs, a boy and his alcoholic, abandoned mom, a local police officer dispossessed of his family and his home. There's also the young couple who live across the street from Rachel's vegetable stand: a wife in the grip of mysterious fantasies about murdering her husband, who is himself in the grip of fantasies about bedding the women to whom he sells new thermal windows. None of these people is evil; in fact Campbell makes it clear that all her citizens are compassionate and good. Rather than devious, they are dumbstruck--by the wild passions that have taken root inside them like weeds. And the fertilizer fueling all this growth seems to have been somehow siphoned off the land itself. Campbell turns farm country into a kind of wilderness in which all kinds of natural and unnatural phenomenons play out: extremes of weather, unexplained vanishings, involuntary sexual encounters, accidents of God. When Rachel is deflowered at 14 by the black sheep of the Harland clan, her eccentric mother shoots him, snagging her daughter and a chicken all with one shot. The daughter survives (though the chicken does not) and lives to anchor the story's movement through one day--Oct. 9, 1999--that follows a few years after the shooting. The day in question pits wilderness against community in a good number of ways. Birdwatcher April May Rathburn serves as the community's elder stateswoman and its peacemaking visionary when she sees how "farms and new homes could coexist, if houses lined the roads and the farming took place in acreage behind the houses, if new people would be tolerant of the realities of farming, and if the farmers wouldn't automatically resist change." At such moments the author's creation risks being a mouthpiece for some political agenda (a reader almost can't not hear, "Can't we all get along?"). But we forgive April May, who owns the saving graces of her weird passions--for stuff like birds and gourds and fire. Though the novel is narrated from many characters' points of view, there is also an omniscient speaker who swoops in at times to tell us pertinent facts from the region's natural and unnatural histories. We learn about the migration of caterpillars and the introduction of English sparrows. We're told that George's ancestors lived compassionately beside the Indians, and we even learn the native words for "I'm hungry," words whose utterance "filled the woman of the house with dread, but she would then remind herself that it was always an Indian who returned her milk cow when it got loose and wandered into the woods, and it had largely been the strength of Potawatomi arms that had raised the first barns in the township." In this way the past inhabits the novel and shapes in particular the character (in both senses of the word) of Rachel. The half-breed girl is haunted by the story of an Indian girl who similarly sowed the land and who committed suicide rather than let herself be married and forced to cede her land to a husband. Rachel has the burden of propelling most of the plot, and she remains enigmatic and unfortunately the book's most wooden character, compelled to inject a curse into each of her sentences, a practice that quickly gets old. Clearly Campbell is shooting for an offbeat flavor by tagging her people with quirky traits, but in Rachel these traits seem not quite a natural outgrowth of her core. So the changes she undergoes by the novel's end are not as unexpected as one might hope: She is in effect the straw man (straw girl?) built to be disassembled. Campbell is, of course, rooting for the oppressed; readers will have to deactivate their political-correctness meters and just roll with this narratorial heart that lies with the Indians and the exiles. But most of all it is the land that Campbell wants to champion, this dirt that is imbued with sexual desire. The lesson here is that nature will find a way to retaliate when sexuality is repressed, and we are offered the cautionary tale of Mary O'Kearsy, a schoolteacher driven out of town for her affair (carried on in a barn, of course) with a local farmhand. As Mary is swept out of town, a tornado sweeps through to knock out a house or two, and the townsfolk are left to mourn for what they have lost and for their own part in its loss. Campbell's being such a knowledgeable naturalist and historian makes us willing to let her get up on her soapbox. She's a good candidate for the role of public defender of the land she so obviously treasures. Because the climax is placed a smidgen earlier than we expect, the story is afforded the opportunity to amble through a protracted close that is charmingly unaffected. Almost everybody is redeemed, and April May's vision of a community where agriculture rests in balance with development is temporarily achieved. And community itself rests in balance with wildness. As April May muses on behalf of all of Q Road's residents: "[I]t was also good sometimes to be at the mercy of uncontrollable forces. Like the tornado that destroyed a swath of the town when she was seven, disasters brought everybody together and gave them something to remember, put them in a common awe, the way God used to."
Chicago Tribune, October 27, 2002.
|