This is one of those books I distinctly remember my mom and her friends reading and discussing at some point. I don’t know what books from the adult world circulated around your childhood, if any, but for me it was a handful of Stephen King novels, Tom Clancy and James Clavell novels, and weirdly, a copy of Dianetics that my dad tried to read about about two or three years running.
This one LOOKS like one thing, but is a different thing. It looks like a kind of bookclub selection or a nice, charming book about a nice Southern lady. Instead, it’s a slim and horrifying book about violence and abuse in North Carolina. If you were thinking, hey that sounds a lot like Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, you’re right, it is a lot like that book. And they came out about the same time.
This book is merely ok. It’s interesting because it’s a first novel and it holds a lot of promise, but I can’t really tell you what else Kaye Gibbons has written, and I wouldn’t say she’s really delivered on that promise. I think Dorothy Allison’s book is a lot better and more realized. There’s nothing wrong with this book in any meaningful way, but it feels decidedly limited in its capacity.
“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.
The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he’d be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something’s the matter with my daddy. When they come in the house I’m all in a state of shock and just don’t know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I’m shaking all over.
But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he’s in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of four.
All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. All I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive.”
(Photo: http://link.wwpl.lib.in.us/portal/Ellen-Foster-Kaye-Gibbons/-cdoD0FfDRc/)
