Salvage this World by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on April 25, 2023

There’s nothing for the people of coastal Mississippi and Louisiana but hurricanes, storms, and floods. No crops. No jobs. No hope. This is the kind of landscape that Michael Farris Smith was born to chronicle.

Jessie’s mother died in childbirth. Her father Wade tells himself he did his best to raise her but he knows he didn’t. He spent too much time in the bottle, too little time trying to overcome his demons, self-pity first among them.

Jessie was not yet eighteen when Holt came into her life. Wade didn’t like Holt but he was powerless to stop Jessie when she jumped into his pickup and left Wade behind. Holt has physical and emotional scars from an abusive childhood but he cares about Jessie and the child they conceive.

Before meeting Jessie, Holt worked for the Temple of Pain and Glory, a tent revival that uses “hellfire and damnation” to camouflage “a more pure theology of greed and dread and lust.” Elser assures her audiences that a young girl with the power to control the weather has been sent by God to save them from hurricanes. Holt stole money and a ring of mysterious keys from the Temple and fled. He only tells Jessie that he is on the run when she is pregnant with his child.

After Holt tells Jessie the truth, he instructs her to grab the keys and run if bad people come. When an unfamiliar car comes up the driveway, that’s what she does, carrying her son Jace into the woods. She steals a car and soon realizes that the foul stench in the back is caused by a decaying corpse. Eventually she makes her way back to Wade because she has nowhere else to go.

The disparate pieces of the plot are adhered by happenstance, but each is a pleasure to read. We eventually learn why there is a body in the car that Jessie steals. The story ends in an ambiguous revelation as the reader gets a horrific glimpse of the secret that the keys unlock. The ambiguity might put off some readers, but the mood and the way characters react to their struggles is more important than understanding why events unfold as they do.

For Wade, Salvage this World is a story of redemption. He is old and alone, but he is given one last chance to set aside his mistakes, salvage the most important part of his life, and be the kind of father or grandfather his family needs, if only for a moment. For Jessie and Holt, the story is largely a fight to survive. They both have opportunities to remake their lives — slender opportunities, given their pasts and the land in which they live — but they must confront the evil that pursues them before they can think about moving ahead.

Smith scatters grit into every sentence. His prose is powerful, stark and evocative. The story’s darkness is echoed in scenes of violence or dread that unfold in tunnels or back woods at night, in religious beliefs that will not withstand the scrutiny of sunshine. Because the novel has few characters, Smith has room to develop themes of alienation and reluctant decency and survival in a hostile land through the backstories of secondary characters. Old men refuse to evacuate during hurricane warnings because a stubborn connection to their place in the world is stronger than their fear that the government might be right about something. Friends feel an obligation to help each other but they would rather not. Poverty and child abuse exist because they are part of a cycle that people are powerless to break.

Smith builds the tension of a thriller into a story of desperate lives. Characters salvage what they can in this novel, both literally and figuratively. For all the darkness, the story offers a glimmer of hope that relationships can be salvaged, that a grandchild born into a stormy world might grow up to have a sunnier life than their parents or grandparents. Still, Smith leaves the impression that they'll need to escape the land of tent revivals if they want to give themselves a chance.

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