Pineda’s modern Southern Gothic novel talks about independence, parental flaws, hard times, and overcoming the odds.
Jon Pineda
Novel | 256 Pages | 5.8” x 8.6” | Reviewed: Hardcover
9780374185244 | First Edition | $26.00
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | New York City | BUY HERE
In his latest novel, Jon Pineda gives us a modern Southern Gothic tale. Pearl, a young teenaged girl living in the rural South, has a life few can comprehend after her family falls on hard times. Now, Pearl is stuck squatting in a house with no electricity or running water with her father and two of her mother’s male relatives, Dox and Fritter.
Pearl is the only girl living in a house of men; they genuinely love her but are incapable of taking care of her. Their own demons of alcoholism, post-war life, and frozen economic mobility keep them busy enough, and none of the adults work regular jobs. Without parental supervision, Pearl is allowed to roam the land surrounding their makeshift dwelling. Most her days are spent scavenging for food: checking the snares she’s set up, hoping the crayfish traps have a hull, gathering wild berries. Sometimes there’s food; sometimes there’s not. That is Pearl’s reality.
During her wanderings, she meets a boy, Mason, to whom she refers as Main Boy. He tells her the land on which her family is currently squatting was purchased by his father as a present to Mason. He promises to keep her family’s secret, though. A budding, but unequal, relationship blossoms between the two. Pearl learns quickly that Main Boy also comes around with his friends, other teenaged boys from wealthy families whose greatest aspirations are becoming Internet-famous from posting prank videos. Pearl refers to the them all as flies:
“Flies because they talk a lot of shit and love it. … Flies because in the dictionary my father owns, a group of flies is called a business. I wish I were making that up. I should refer to their club as a business, but that wouldn’t be precise. They are flies. Their business is talking shit and shooting things, though not necessarily in that order.”
The flies live up to their namesake. The novel climaxes when they attempt an awful prank on Pearl.
Time is not a set thing when Pearl discusses the past, but we know her mother abandoned their family, first mentally, then physically. After her mother left, her father’s façade cracked and came apart. He was once a respected college professor; now his daughter is not even enrolled in high school. The contradictions that arise in the characters’ pasts make them so believably human.
Despite all the evidence, Pearl is still holding out hope her father will save her, save them both, from the run of bad luck their family’s had, though she knows most of the bad luck was caused by his relentless drinking. By the end of the novel, she’s not as disillusioned. She loves her father, but she realizes, like all children eventually do, her parent is just as human and flawed as the rest of us. Even living in squalor, even with a brokenhearted, drunk father and despite an absent mother, Pearl does not hate the world or herself. That’s one of the most revolutionary pieces of the novel; Pearl can see the world is a tough place to live and sometimes people buckle under its pressure, but she doesn’t. Because of all she’s been through, she understands she can survive anywhere, adapt to any way of life when necessary.
Pineda fills the chapters with detailed rural scenery. If you’re a fan of the Southern Gothic genre, this is a novel for you. Pineda uses some heavy-handed symbolism throughout the prose, but he doesn’t overplay the delivery. I adore literature where what’s written between the lines matters as much as the plot and characters, such as the symbolism of Pearl’s father burning her mother’s old manuscript, letting the burden of her mother and all she represented burn away, giving us hope for Pearl.
“He pulls at the typed pages like they’re petals. He feeds the petals into the fire. Inside the notebooks is the woman’s cursive writing, the ongoing record of her trying to find the right word, to get as close to the original meaning as possible. In the end, she ran out of ways to express herself, and that’s the brutal, beautiful truth.”
And I really want to hope for Pearl.
