GETTING MOTHER'S BODY by Suzan-Lori Parks (Random House $23.95, 257 pp)
Suzan-Lori Parks, who won a 2001 MacArthur "genius grant" and a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, appears to have decided to follow these two stellar achievements with a third: the publication of Getting Mother's Body, a masterful first novel.
Set in 1963 in a one-horse Texas town called Lincoln, the heroine of Parks' novel is Billy Beede, a pregnant, unwed teenage girl with a fierce and shining spirit second only, it could be argued, to that of her long-dead mother, Willa Mae. Willa Mae Beede may have died six years ago, but her spirit lives on in Billy's memory and in the thoughts of those who knew her.
Beautiful, wild, demanding, unreasonable, capable of swindling just about anyone when the need arose, Willa Mae's greatest legend was achieved upon her death from a botched abortion: It is said that, when she went to her grave, a strand of pearls and a diamond ring went with her.
To Billy, and to her Aunt June and Uncle Roosevelt, who took her in after her mother died, those two items are nothing less than buried treasure. So when the family learns that Willa Mae's grave, under an tract of Arizona desert, will soon be plowed up to make way for a new shopping mall, Billy sets off on a quest to resurrect her mother's body and lay claim to that legendary treasure, her birthright.
Getting Mother's Body, like William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is written from the point of view of many different characters and concerns, ultimately, the proper burial of a dead matriarch, the setting to rights of a family legacy, which is to say, it's own salvation. It's a story of rootless people looking for a means to settle down and it features a series of road trips that are once hilarious, suspenseful and deeply moving.
THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR by Le Thi Diem Thuy (Knopf, $18, 158 pp)
Le Thi Diem Thuy was born in Vietnam. In 1978, when she was six years old, she and her father escaped by boat to Singapore; her mother, who somehow missed the boat, joined them two years later in Southern California, where the family ultimately landed. The Gangster We Are All Looking For is an account, in sketches and pieces, of what happened, a portrait of the peripatetic lives of Vietnamese refugees in late 20th century America.
The novel is told from the author's point of view, starting when she was a young child. It describes a series of homes and apartments where she and her father (and later her mother) came to live. In every home there is both joy and sadness, but the enemy is most often a gangster within. Her father, who in Vietnam was first a soldier then a prisoner in a detention camp, has a drinking problem; her mother, whose parents never approved of her marriage to her father, is at first practical yet whimsical, though in the end, only sad. Loss permeates the family's life, from the brother who drowned years before they left Vietnam to the years when the father was away or imprisoned, to the loss of a country.
What makes this work fiction, and not simply memoir, is the poetry. The young girl finds a butterfly encased in glass and becomes convinced she can hear its cries, begging to be released from its imprisonment; the palm of her hand becomes a landscape, made of blue skies and endless desert; a dead brother haunts her like an ocean of sadness. The girl grows up and runs away when she is 16. The distance from her parents does not solve anything.
"I don't know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away," the girl muses upon her return, 20 years later, to the land of her birth, and the thought, which seems to imply something more, is never really completed. It is as if the life of a refugee remains, in the end, an open question.
- Mindi Dickstein lives in New Jersey and is currently writing lyrics for the Broadway-bound musical Little Women.
