Mary Alice Monroe: Sweetgrass / The Secrets We Keep (2005)

This is the English edition of Sweetgrass, retitled The Secrets We Keep. I'm not too sure why though: did the publishers think the word 'sweetgrass' would be unknown to English people, did they think it so obscure that they had to change it to something safer, more sellable? I suspect this is the case, although the effect is to take the flavor out of the whole thing because sweetgrass is not only a central theme of the book but it serves as one of the geographical anchors.

Like two of the books by Mary Alice Monroe that I've read before – The Beach House (2002) and Swimming Lessons (2007)* – Sweetgrass is an example of the Lowcountry subgenre of Southern literature, being set around Charleston. Because South Carolina is the 'palmetto state', references to that tree are almost mandatory, as are references to the devastation of the 1989 Hurricane Hugo, and of course references to sweetgrass and the traditional baskets made from this product. Whereas Monroe's two earlier books reveal a great deal of research into turtles and their plight, in Sweetgrass a major concern is in the craftwork that goes into that commodity, and its increasing scarcity due to housing development in the region.

The main story, though, is about the secrets alluded in the unfortunate English title. Preston Blakely is the husband of Mary June  – that double name obviously being an important Southern identifier – and they are the parents of their dead older son Hamlin, the younger Morgan who hasn't seen his parents for a number of years, and their daughter Nan, whose husband Hank seems bent on estranging her from her family history and therefore from herself.

Enter Morgan, back to the family after his father has suffered a serious stroke. Both Mary June and Preston have distanced themselves from him, although Mary June has in particular following the accidental death of Hamlin. But Morgan will soon more than redeem himself in their eyes (or at least in Preston's one functioning eye).

Crunch time comes when the rapacious Adele – Mary June's ex-friend and sister-in-law, and also Hank's employer – plots with Hank to make a financial killing out of selling the Blakely home, which is also called Sweetgrass, and is becoming an increasing economic burden to Mary June and Preston. While examining the legal niceties of Adele's intended takeover, Morgan chances upon love letters revealing that shortly before marrying Preston, Mary June had a brief love affair with Preston's older brother Tripp, which resulted in her carrying the future Hamlin in her womb: after the accidental death of Tripp she very quickly marries Preston.

Morgan discovers a legal escape route that reveals the extent of Adele's treachery, and together with this the chance discovery of a nearby forgotten slave cemetery (at the same location as a secret sweetgrass patch) neatly put an end to Adele's intended acquisition of the house. In this way, both the property and the sweetgrass themes are woven together.

The good guys win in the end, OK, and maybe there's a bit too much plot in the mix to hold together completely convincingly, but on the plus side no attempt is made to tie everything in a neat bow, although I was mighty pleased to see that Hank got Nan's feminist hackles up far enough for her to ditch her slimy husband.

* I've also read Time Is a River (2008) although, unusually for Monroe, that novel is set in the Appalachians around Asheville, North Carolina.

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Mary Alice Monroe and The Isle of Palms, South Carolina

Karen White: The Memory of Water (2008)

Karen White's The Memory of Water is an example of the Lowcountry sub-genre of Southern Literature, is set in South Carolina, and is told by four narrators:

Diana, a gifted painter with bipolar disorder who has lost much of her creativity under a fog of prescribed drugs.

Marnie, Diana's sister who teaches children with special needs in Arizona, who returns to South Carolina for an indetermined period.

Quinn, Diana's ex-husband who has invited Marnie over.

Gil, Diana and Quinn's nine-year-old son, who has recently gone dumb.

Diana and Marnie were in a boat accident a number of years before, in which their mother, another mentally ill person, apparently died. Marnie has little memory of the events, although there's obviously a huge communication problem between the sisters, who haven't seen each other for ten years.

Recently there has been another boat accident, and although both Diana and Gil have survived, they are evidently very disturbed by the ordeal and Quinn hopes that Marnie can help Gil recover from the trauma.

The fear of water and the curative power of (and often indirect communication by) art are central motifs in this often perceptive – even beautifully written – but ultimately unsatisfying novel that seems to begin in the right places but ends unbelievably: an absorbing psychological mystery turns into Southern Gothic with a denouement that drowns in its own contrivances.

Sue Monk Kidd: The Mermaid Chair (2005)

Sue Monk Kidd was in her fifties by the time her first novel The Secret Life of Bees (2002) was published, but her second - The Mermaid Chair - reads like a far more mature work.

Kidd was born in Sylvester, Georgia, although she now lives near Charleston, South Carolina, and The Mermaid Chair occupies a place in  the Low Country sub-genre of Southern literature. Although set almost entirely on the fictional barrier island of Egret, on which stands a fictional monastery, Kidd had Bull Island in mind, and the Mermaid Chair in its chapel is based on the Mermaid Chair in the parish church of St Senara, Zennor, Cornwall, England.*

Zennor of course was where D. H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda fruitlessly sought refuge from the zenophobia of the time in 1915 (and where Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry briefly joined them), and it no doubt didn't escape Kidd's attention that D. H. Lawrence's most famous novel Lady Chatterley's Lover is partly about adultery. In The Mermaid Chair, Jessie Sullivan's adultery with Brother (Doubting) Thomas (or Whit in, er, real life) is central to the story, and the intense emotional and sexual development the couple experience (and their love nest surely owing something to Mellors's hut in Lady Chatterley?) is a major part of the their individual development as separate, more fully rounded people.

This intelligent novel of challenges to spiritual,  sexual and familial life, although very popular, does not deserve to be restricted to the chicklit ghetto to which some people (quite possibly unintentionally) might seek to confine it.

*The legend is that a mermaid living in nearby Pendour Cove fell in love with Matthew Trewhella, who sang the closing hymn in the church every night. She took to visiting the church in a dress, he took one look at her and fell in love too, carried her to the cove and disappeared into the sea with her. The Mermaid Chair has two wooden bench ends, one of which is carved with a mermaid holding a comb and mirror.

Pat Conroy: South of Broad (2009)

There have been fifteen years between Pat Conroy's Beach Music (1995) and his latest novel, South of Broad (2009). This is the first of his books that I've read, and the title in itself is intriguing. Googling won't do much good, and in fact will probably even confuse, as there's a rather odd online description of the expression by a writer who has obviously gotten the wrong end of the stick. 'South of Broad' is an expression used to describe where the Charlestonian aristocracy live - and also their mindset, as the same writer would have known if she'd given enough attention to the novel. And as the protagonist's father says: 'South of Broad is a conspiracy of platelets, son: blood and breeding are all that matter there. No, that's not true: there's got to be a truck full of money somewhere near the blood bank.' Yes indeed: 'South of Broad' is an expression Conroy uses to describe a very small but very wealthy area on the Charleston peninsula, South Carolina, namely that from Broad Street down to the Battery, where the peninsula joins the Atlantic.

And the protagonist is one Leopold Bloom King, named after the protagonist in James Joyce's Ulysses, on which his mother, Dr Lindsay King, wrote her thesis. The book also begins on Bloomsday: 16 June (but 1969, as opposed to Joyce's 1904), a tremendously important day when Leo sets free two orphans handcuffed to a chair (surely some Beckett in there?), learns his mother was a nun some time before, and after having no friends at all, makes a number of them who will be remarkably significant and faithful to the end of the book. And the book's final word is 'Yes', which is the final word in Ulysses, the final word spoken by Molly, Ulysses's wife, who has the same forename as the woman whom Leo has loved throughout South of Broad.

And it's a long book, containing more than 500 pages. Is it worth reading? Conroy has stated that his earlier novel, The Great Santini (1976), had its beginning in asking why he (Conroy) wanted to kill his father, and The Prince of Tides (1986) its beginning in asking why Conroy's eldest sister was sent mad by their parents, but South of Broad doesn't appear to begin with any question, and seems to be based on parts of characters the author has known.

South of Broad involves incest and other parental abuses, murder and other violence, suicides and various forms of madness, the terrors of Hurricane Hugo, etc, and on the surface doesn't look too good as literary fiction: parts of the novel are overwritten, there are too many coincidences, characters are sometimes unbelievable:  maybe this is just popular fiction masquerading as literary fiction?

No, not at all, and in many ways this is a brilliant novel that attempts to emphasize the similarities - as opposed to the differences - between black and white, rich and poor, and various social classes in general. But Pat Conroy is not a major author, and I don't think he'd ever pretend to be, although he is still very underrated as a serious novelist.

Mary Alice Monroe and The Isle of Palms, South Carolina: Southern Literary Tour, Part Two: #17

Mary Alice Munroe's novels form part of what can be described as a sub-genre of literature of the South – Lowcountry literature, of which the two novels above are examples: The Beach House (2002), and its sequel Swimming Lessons (2007). Both books are set in Isle of Palms, which is slightly to the north-east of Sullivan's Island and about ten miles from Charleston.

The books abound in references to the geography of the area, and the weather is always a concern: the Lowcountry has not forgotten the destruction wrought by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and toward the end of The Beach House there is a hurricane from which the characters escape. While we were in the Appalachians and moving toward the east, there was a strong concern that we would be prevented from going because of Hurricane Earl. As it happened, though, people moved out of Nantucket way up in Massachusetts, and people were battening down the hatches in the barrier islands of North Carolina in the Kill Devil Hills area, but Earl moved further into the Atlantic, so it was safe for us to move in.

Throughout The Beach House and Swimming Lessons, turtles are used as a metaphor for the behavior of humans: the protection and preservation of turtles are a major concern even before the books begins – there's a quotation from Thoreau regarding them, plus a dedication to the Isle of Palms/Sullivan's Island Turtle Team, to which Mary Alice Monroe (and the two book's protagonists) belong.

Another writer of this subgenre is Dorothea Benton Frank, who writes novels she calls 'Lowcountry Tales', and which have such titles as Isle of Palms (2004), Pawley's Island (2005), Bulls Island (2008), and Return To Sullivans Island (2009). Frank's books seem to be designed for a much more popular market: they're all (I think) in the first person, and tend to be very chatty, much more colloquial, more dialog-driven, with frequent exlamation marks, and with the use of 'you',  the narrator appears to be speaking directly to the reader.

The Ravenel Bridge, or to give it its full title, the Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge, which is named after a (Republican) Charleston politician and also called the New Cooper Bridge after the Cooper River it goes over, stretches from downtown Charleston to Mount Pleasant. It is 471 meters long, was built in 2005, and it is quite an experience to drive. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Mary Alice Monroe's Swimming Lessons mentions the protagonist Toy Sooner 'zoom[ing] over the gleaming new Ravenel Bridge'.

The Beach House and Swimming Lessons have a character called Brett, a naturalist who runs an eco-tours business, which is obviously an important activity here.

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Mary Alice Monroe: Sweetgrass / The Secrets We Keep (2005)

Karen White and Folly Beach, South Carolina: Southern Literary Tour, Part Two: #15

This novel is another example of the Lowcountry sub-genre of Southern literature, and as such is peppered with names of places in the area, and around Folly Island in particular, where it is almost exclusively set. It alternates between the years of the Second World War and the present, is much concerned with bottle trees, romantic manuscript research, and Nazi spies off the coast of the barrier islands of the Carolinas.

Folly Island is about a twenty-minute drive from Charleston, and the picturesque Morris Island lighthouse is in Charleston Harbor, at the north-eastern extremity of the island. It features prominently in On Folly Island. A leaflet written by Jim Booth, of Save the Light, Inc., reveals that the lighthouse's foundations are damaged and calls for donations. Years of beach erosion worsened the situation when jetties were built at Charleston.

The first lighthouse was built on Morris island in 1767, another one was built in 1838, and work on the present one, which stands at 158 feet, was begun in 1872. In 1962 it was decommissioned and replaced by a new one at Sullivan's Island. Save the Light, Inc. bought Morris Island lighthouse in 1999, although the State of South Carolina now has title to it and leases it to the organization for fundraising, etc.

Typical beach houses on Folly Island.