This isn’t to say that there aren’t missteps. Leaving aside the instances of explicit violence, the scenes featuring the hunger and confusion of small children are almost physically unbearable. I’m happy to report that He is fully in evidence in this novel. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that.” She needed, she said, to channel her “Old Testament God.” I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. “All of the young black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. “I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs,” she wrote. In her memoir, Ward chided herself for being too fond of her characters early in her career. She hauls her children along, and they unknowingly pick up a mysterious hitchhiker: the ghost of a 12-year-old boy, a former prisoner at Parchman. Leonie, that walking catastrophe, decides to collect him (and perhaps cook a little meth along the way). The story is set in motion when Michael is slated for release from prison. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America.Ĭredit. However eternal its concerns, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward’s new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. “ Men We Reaped” (2013), her memoir, is a requiem for five young black men, including the author’s brother, who were lost to murder, suicide and addiction. “ Salvage the Bones” (2011), her National Book Award-winning novel, follows a family caught in Hurricane Katrina (which Ward and her family narrowly survived). Her characters are tested not by the gods but by other elements, no less absolute in their pronouncements.

Not for her the austerity and self-conscious ironies of so much American fiction her books reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives. Her memoir and three novels - produced in the span of less than a decade - feel hewn from these grand Faulknerian verities. The novelist Jesmyn Ward pinned this speech above her desk. In his wonderfully cranky Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner exhorted his fellow writers to create from the heart, not “the glands.” Address the immortal truths, he instructed: “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

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