Where the Crawdads Sing (2018)
By Delia Owens
G. P. Putnam and Sons, 384 pages.
★★★
Where the Crawdads Sing was among the top-selling novels of 2018, helped
enormously by an endorsement from actress Reese Witherspoon, who has secured
the right to make a film adaptation. You can also find effusive, even
worshipful praise from those who post reviews to Amazon and Good Reads. Does it
live up to its hype? It depends upon which part of the book one means.
The bulk of the story takes
place between 1952-1969. It centers on Katherine “Kya” Clark, whom we first
meet at age 6. She lives in the wetlands of coastal North Carolina and hails
from what is derisively called poor white trash. When Kya observes her mother
walking down the dirt track in her “fake alligator shoes” carrying a case, Kya
quickly surmises that she might not be coming back. For the next 4 years she
witnesses her older siblings leave home, including Jodie to whom she is
closest. Poverty can grind you down, and pa has become an abusive alcoholic who
disappears for long stretches until one day he stops coming home at all. From
this point on Kya is on her own.
This is the first of several
improbable things a reader must accept. Locals whisper about “Marsh Girl,” who occasionally
comes to town (the fictional Barkley Cove) to buy supplies, but few ever
venture to the ramshackle cabin where she lives. (You’d need a boat or an
exceedingly rugged vehicle to get there.) The school truant officer manages to
track her down and forces her to attend one day of school, where other pupils
make fun of her. This will be her only formal education; Kya is swamp smart and
knows how to hide.
How does she survive? That’s
where improbable thing number two comes into play. Kya digs mussels and fishes
from the small boat her father left, and sells them to “Jumpin’,” a black man
who operates a fuel, fish, and bait shop in the bayou. Also, he, his wife
Mabel, and a deep-in-the-woods black church supply the charity that white Christians
only think about for an hour on Sundays. Plus Kya comes to know the marsh in
all its rhythms, mysteries, and abundance.
The only one to breach her
watery fortress signals in ways only one versed in nature would know: by
leaving rare shells and feathers by an old stump Kya passes on her travels. He
is Tate Walker, a boy her own age who loves the marsh almost as much as Kya, and
will eventually teach her to read. In one of the book’s least believable
passages, Tate will also explain menstruation to Kya, a device we are supposed
to believe because Tate harbors dreams of becoming a marine biologist. (Huh?)
Despite credulity issues, these
sections of the book are so beautifully evocative that we can conjure mental
images of the marsh and metaphorically lick the saltwater from the pages. Owens
wrote three non-fiction books on African wildlife before penning Crawdads, her debut novel, and possesses
a gift for making us feel both the wonders and terrors of nature. It’s when she
takes us beyond childhood that things become problematic. As Kya and Tate get
older, Crawdads drifts toward contrivance
and the cheap sentimentality of a YA novel. When Tate goes off to college and
stops coming around, isn’t he just like the teens on the beach that make fun of
her? Or worse, just the latest to abandon her?
By the time she 23, Kya is
deep into poetry, but is also a self-trained evolutionary biologist familiar
with John Maynard Smith’s “sneaky fuckers” study of how the male of a species often
assumes a subordinate role to mate with a female. (It often goes badly. I’d say
ask a male praying mantis, except you can’t for various reasons!) Kya is also recognized
as a budding ethnologist for her keen observations and beautiful and exacting
illustrations of swamp ecology. She has even been out of the marsh to meet with
a publisher. Still, she’s at least 50% feral/socially inept, so how does she
negotiate the attention shown her by the studly Chase Andrews, a former star
high school quarterback who comes from the closest thing Barkley Cove has to a
bourgeoisie: one that owns a Western Auto store.
When Chase is found dead at
the base of a tower, Kya is charged with his murder, though there are no
footprints and she has an airtight alibi. Owens goes full Harper Lee for
courtroom scenes that feature a deus ex
machina resolution. The central mystery isn’t hard to unravel if you’ve
paid attention to the book’s internal themes and the trial serves to make us
begin to see the various ways in which the book’s internal logic is 21st
century, not that of the 1950s and 1960s. Take the book’s race relations. How
likely is it that a black community would reach out to a white girl during the
age of Jim Crow? Could Kya become an ethnologist without training or a powerful
mentor/sponsor? There is also the matter of a murder investigation that's more
CSI than what was done in he 1960s. Nor is it feasible that a district attorney
would try a white girl when there was no physical evidence–not even in 1960s North
Carolina.
Owens does give us a few
twists here and there: revelations about Kya’s family, a nice play on “broken
token” legends, and an alter ego reveal. Still, after a while the
flashback/flash forward/flash sideways structure wears thin, as do simplistic
good/bad characterizations. If the last few post-1969 chapters feel like tack-ons
to get us to a resolution, that’s because they are.
The phrase “where the
crawdads* sing” references a place where the “critters” (Kya’s phrase) remain
in an Edenic wild space. It’s also a metaphor for how I felt about the novel.
To invoke an old rock song, Kya was born to be wild. When Owens tames her, even
ever so slightly, both Kya and the marsh become more ordinary and the fireflies
dim. Read the novel for its elegant prose, but be skeptical of Ms. Witherspoon’s
gushing adulation.
Rob Weir
* If you don’t know, a
crawdad–also called a crayfish or crawfish–is a crustacean that looks like a
shrimp crossed with a miniature lobster. They are quite tasty.
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