THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501271097
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JENNIFER DAVIS MCDAID
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
BITTERROOT LANDING
SHERI REYNOLDS
G.P. Putnam's Sons. 239 pp. $19.95
CLOSE THE PAGES of Bitterroot Landing, and the smell of swamp water and red earth remains.
In her remarkable first novel, Sheri Reynolds tells a lyrical tale of abuse, abandonment and self-awareness. For Jael, a half-wild child reared by her Mammie on the fringe of a tangled Southern backwoods, life is hard indeed. When the men who play pool and drink homemade liquor at Mammie's store find their way to her bed in the back room, Jael imagines wrapping the vines that grow nearby around their necks.
Rather than work in the store, Jael flees to the woods with a mallet and nails, savagely destroying trees as she runs. When Mammie's dead body is discovered, all assume that a disgruntled customer has crushed her skull. Jael becomes a ward of the court and sleeps on a cot in the church basement until River Bill, a recently widowed deacon, offers to take her in.
The powerful writing of Reynolds, a creative writing instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, transports the reader to River Bill's watery lair, where Jael lives from ages 11 to 21. Working in Bill's bait shop, sleeping in his dead wife's bed and wearing her robe, Jael isn't exactly sure when she became his wife instead of his daughter. To escape the bitter reality of his sour-smelling nocturnal visits, Jael closes her eyes and sends herself ``floating out the window and over the black river.''
Thompie Hayes arrives one morning in his motorboat to buy jelly worms and a Coke, and Jael impulsively leaves with him for the far reaches of the river. She awakes the next day at a place called Liar's Junction, alone. Stranded in the swamp, Jael makes a home beneath a half-upturned tree. When three female campers find her, she is half-starved and weak from infected wounds she has given herself. After she recovers, Jael feigns amnesia in an attempt to start her life anew. At the first opportunity, she studies an atlas to calculate the physical distance between herself and River Bill.
In prose that is at once gentle and gripping, Reynolds reveals Jael's tentative exploration of her new surroundings: a tiny apartment in a church basement, where she can hear through a hole in the wall the weekly group therapy meetings of incest survivors. Listening to their stories, Jael develops the courage to tell her own: ``Hi, my name is Jael, and sometimes I get too scared to move. Hi, my name is Jael, and I cut myself up for kicks. Hi, my name is Jael, and I've lied to everybody.''
Bitterroot Landing is a tale of wrenching sorrow and spiritual renewal. Reynolds skillfully traces Jael's transformation from a girl imbued with self-loathing to a woman enhanced by hard-won self-respect with much delicacy and feeling. The narrative is truly moving. Facing her past and sharing it is the hardest thing that Jael has ever done; it is also the most important. Listening to the voices (both real and imagined) of others, Jael finds her own voice and speaks out.
Award-winning North Carolina author Lee Smith has called Reynolds' work ``scary and brilliant.'' In Jael, Reynolds has created a character whose impact lasts long after her story has been told. For the author who gave her voice, this is an auspicious beginning.
MEMO: Jennifer Davis McDaid works at the Virginia State Library and
Archives in Richmond.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheri Reynolds wrote Bitterroot Landing while she was a student in
the master's in fine arts program at Virginia Commonwealth University in
Richmond. She originally had intended to retell the story of the
biblical Jael in modern-day terms, but her project ``turned into a
different book.'' Rather than reinventing the Old Testament heroine who
killed an oppressor of the Israelites with a tent spike, Reynolds
created a new Jael, one who survives abuse by discovering her inner
strength.
Although writing her first novel was ``emotionally exhausting,''
Reynolds found that the narrative ``poured out'' of her with relative
ease. Rather than adhering to a schedule, she worked ``in big chunks of
time,'' not writing for as long as a month and then quickly producing a
hundred pages of text.
Reynolds, 27, teaches creative writing part time at VCU. With her
second novel already accepted by G.P. Putnam's Sons (and due out this
time next year), she is at work on a third. A South Carolina native,
Reynolds, who writes poetry but not short fiction, describes her family
as ``a bunch of storytellers.'' She is continuing the family tradition.
- JENNIFER DAVIS MCDAID
[For a copy of the excerpt, see microfilm for this date.]
ILLUSTRATION: HUNTER SESSOMS
by CNB