Mudbound

Jennie Camp, Special to the Rocky

Friday, March 14, 2008

* Fiction. By Hillary Jordan. Algonquin, $21.95. Grade: A

Plot in a nutshell: Jordan's impressive first novel is set in 1940s Mississippi, where World War II and the Jim Crow South provide a tense backdrop for Laura McAllan's struggle to raise her children on the rustic delta farm that is her husband's dream.

As Laura fights to create normalcy in poverty, two war heroes return to form an unexpected friendship that tests the limits of Southern culture: Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, whose charm and energy are the enticing antithesis of her husband, Henry; and Ronsel Jackson, the witty and passionate son of black sharecroppers who work on the McAllan farm.

The novel's inevitable closing scenes are painfully violent, utterly memorable and surprisingly rich in cultural metaphor and well-wrought literary ploy.

Sample of prose: "When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patches across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown."

Pros: Jordan's characters are complex and diverse: from Laura, the mother who accepts her lot on her husband's impoverished farm without sacrificing her own fierce sense of self; to Henry, the stubborn, stoic farmer who carefully shuts his mind to certain indecencies and yet clearly adores his family; to Pappy, Henry and Jamie's aggravating father whose life has been reduced to sitting around Laura's kitchen barking orders and lamenting his own sad dependency; to Jamie, the dashing younger brother who comes home from the war clearly shaken by the horrors he has witnessed.

Cons: None.

Final word: Jordan unhesitatingly lays out the injustices of the 1940s South. Rather than drifting toward the pat solutions that too many novels of this era suggest, she leaves us both satisfied and mired in the frustrations of cultural prejudices that extend well beyond the post-bellum American South. Jordan is an author to watch.