Poetry with Pit Bulls: On Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

I had already started William Faulkner's Wild Palms, when I picked up a copy of Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award–winning novel, Salvage the Bones. My first thought was that I might do a comparative analysis of the two because I was finding all sorts of interesting connections: Salvage takes place in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina while part of Wild Palms is set during "the great flood of 1927"; both novels feature pregnant women who are compared to animals (in Wild Palms, Charlotte is catlike, whereas Ward's narrator, Esch, sees herself in her brother's pit bull, China). On top of this, Esch tells us she got an A for a paper she wrote on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. "I answered the hardest question right," she says: "Why does the young boy think his mother is a fish?"

And perhaps there is something in these connections, but shortly after I started reading Salvage the Bones, I had to put Wild Palms aside completely. Though I consider myself quite a Faulknerd (a term Nathan came up with a few weeks ago), Ward's exquisite novel swept me away and pulled me deep into its narrative with absolute force. A highly literary novel, making self-conscious allusions Faulkner and Greek myth, Salvage the Bones is also completely raw and gripping, with startlingly visceral scenes and descriptions.

Though narrated by the the fifteen-year-old Esch, who discovers early on that she is pregnant, the novel has as much (or more) to do with her brother Skeetah and his dog China. At the beginning of the novel, China gives birth to a litter of puppies, and it is clear from the start that Esch interprets her own situation—and motherhood in general—with reference to China. The fact that China is a pit bull, capable of terrifying viciousness and power, says a lot about Esch's own experience and understanding. Her mother died in childbirth with her younger brother, Junior, and this loss makes her recognize early on how fragile life is and colours how she thinks about motherhood.

Additionally, Skeetah's relationship with China seems to carry dark echoes of his father's relationship to his mother. That he loves his dog seems unquestionable. He risks life and limb to get medicine when he fears she has parvo; he spends the last of his family's money on dog food; he tends to her wounds before his own. And yet, his demand that she obey him, his need to be her master, evokes the idea of domestic abuse. In many ways, Skeetah seems to be the novel's hero, but Ward makes any identification or sympathy with him deeply complicated and troubling. Beneath anger, violence, and desperation runs a powerful current of love, making the novel far too complex for the question of heroes and villains. (That being said, let me add that I believe dog fighting is deeply wrong and unquestionably cruel. I don't mean to imply that this is in any way a moral grey area.)

Not only does Salvage the Bones tell a very powerful story, but Ward's style is also very rich, and her writing makes her characters' world palpable. One technique I noticed and found very effective was how she ties images together with a type of simile that, rather than quickly evoking an image from outside the text, points back to moments in her characters' pasts, filling in more and more details about their existence. For (a rather gross) example, Esch says China's placenta looks "like the inside of the last pig that Daddy had, that he slaughtered and emptied into a tub before making us clean the intestines for chitterlings: it stank so bad Randall threw up." One image or moment unlocks another, not only enriching the description, but also revealing important information about the characters and the life they lead. Ward does this throughout the novel, showing how every moment relates to and evokes another, how even when "what China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had...Junior," the comparison asserts itself and Esch is suddenly describing how her mother gave birth.

Salvage the Bones is a very brilliant novel, well-deserving of the recognition it has received. Ward renders her characters with the utmost compassion and intelligence, and I think this just might be the best novel I read in 2011.