Getting Mother's Body : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading 3.5 stars
Review: This is one of the few contemporary novels I've read in a while that I thought was fairly good. This book takes the approach of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and if you enoyed that, then you will enjoy this, or vice versa. And in reading the reviews of her play Topdog/underdog- they seem to be pretty mixed. I prob would not like the play because it is a tad on the 'hipster' side- but she was able to tell this tale from many POV's.

Rating:
Summary: What A Crazy Story
Review: This novel is set in Lincoln, Texas, in 1963 - the story of several black characters. Billy Beede is a sixteen year old pregnant unmarried high school drop-out, who lives with her one-legged aunt and former preacher uncle. Her con-artist mother Willa Mae died six years previously of a self-induced abortion, and was buried in Arizona in back of her lesbian girlfriend's mother's motel, supposedly still wearing her "jewels" - a pearl necklace and diamond ring.

The goal of these (and other colorful characters picked up along the way) is to dig Willa Mae up, get her jewels, sell them, and therefore solve all their problems. It turns into a madcap adventure from Texas to Arizona, a trip undertaken with not much thought and even less money. These people don't think ahead too far...that would spoil the theme. The story wanders back and forth in time, and the chapters are interspersed with "songs" written by the dead Willa Mae, which personally, I skipped after the first one.

Ms. Parks writes excellent dialogue in perfect dialect. Some of the things the characters do are believable, some are not...did people really jump into bed (or car, or outhouse) with strangers that easily in 1963? And then seem taken aback when confronted with a pregnant sixteen year old with no husband? As if a husband, any husband, would immediately bring relief to the situation.

A few things that irritated me: Billy, her aunt June and Uncle Teddy visit Teddy's cousin Star and her son Homer on their way to Arizona. When it's Homer's turn to speak (his chapter) he announces that Teddy is his uncle. Since Teddy and his mother are cousins, how does he figure that? Even though he's a smart college boy and all. Then at the end of the book, Billy makes a comment about something happening five years from now, as though it's already happened. Doesn't make any sense. Also, I just couldn't figure out what the moral of this story was - Go for what you want? Live your dreams? You never know what's going to happen? Or all's well that ends well? Who knows. This book kept me entertained, but didn't leave me feeling any better off for having read it.