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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Blackwood by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on March 3, 2020

Dark, disturbing, and gritty, Blackwood is Michael Farris Smith’s latest contribution to the literature of the American underbelly. Set in a kudzu-covered valley in rural Mississippi, the novel follows characters who seek escape. The kudzu vines that build a cage around houses and abandoned cars are presumably a symbol of the forces that strangle freedom, forcing characters to reach for figurative machetes to cut themselves free.

Colburn Evans comes back to his hometown in response to an ad that offers a free storefront to anyone who agrees to become a town resident. Colburn assembles sculptures from scrap metal. He envisions the storefront as his workshop. But Colburn finds himself shunned by residents who recall his family’s past, including his father’s apparent suicide-by-hanging. A character tells Colburn that the valley is “one big ghost story. Stories about the past. Stories about the man who killed himself. It’s what we do.” Memories of his father’s death haunt Colburn for reasons that only become fully apparent late in the novel.

The novel’s most decent character is Myers, the local sheriff. He comes across a drifter who appears to be living in a broken down Cadillac with a woman and their son. The story begins with a look at the drifter, who is well along the road to derangement. The fate of the woman and her two children is one of the plot-drivers. The boy soon becomes a fixture in the valley, rummaging through garbage for food, collecting cans in a shopping cart, warily accepting charity, finding independence because he has no choice. Myers eventually comes to regret that he didn’t arrange to repair the Cadillac and send the family on their way. The novel suggests that for a decent person, regrets of that nature — why didn’t I do more to help? —are inevitable.

Colburn is drawn to a bar owner named Celia, another decent character but one who is habitually drawn to troubled men. One of those men, a fellow named Dixon, is married, which creates a conflict (mostly in Dixon’s mind) between Dixon and Colburn. Dixon’s wife wants Dixon to end his embarrassing relationship with Celia while Celia wants Dixon to let her make her own choices about how she lives her life. Like other characters in Blackwood, Dixon struggles to contain the bitterness that compels him to make decisions he will only regret.

The characters coalesce in a plot that uses random acts of violence to illuminate the tragic circumstances of people who cannot see beyond their mistaken assumptions. An unnoticed woman goes missing, followed by the disappearance of twin children. Suspicion focuses on Colburn, since he is an outsider. Eventually another key character goes missing. The misinterpretation of circumstantial evidence leads multiple characters to arrive at false conclusions about the guilt of other characters. Nobody gets it right because they don’t try to get past their anger and view the facts with a rational mind.

In the end, the novel offers a lesson in compassion and understanding. Characters discover the peril of making harsh and unnecessary judgments. One outcast regrets his failure to recognize how he viewed another outcast. “He thought of the boy and the life he had lived and the way he looked and his inability to participate and all that he had missed and would forever miss. It’s not your fault and I looked at you the same way the world looked at you and I should have known better.” If we can’t recognize pain in people who are like us, the novel seems to ask, how can we hope to understand people who are less fortunate than us?

The story’s grit is offset by its grace. Smith’s fluid prose rises above the brutal world it illuminates. Dialog is sharp; atmosphere exudes from the pages. The story is intense, the themes are timeless, and the characters — like your neighbors — are recognizable as types but surprising as individuals. This isn’t a “feel good” story so it might not travel to the top of the best seller charts, but it is a better book than most of the best sellers I’ve read.

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The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown & Co./Lee Boudreaux Books on March 20, 2018

Life is full of improbable coincidences. So is The Fighter, a novel that depends on two or three huge coincidences of time and place and circumstance to bring the story together. Some readers might chalk those circumstances up to fate, particularly in light of the novel’s religious imagery and express references to angels, saviors, and prayer. I’m not much of a believer in fate, and I have criticized other novels for an overreliance on coincidence, but I’m giving The Fighter a pass. Why? Because I enjoyed the story, and in the end, that’s all that matters.

Jack Boucher is a cage fighter and a gambler. He owes money to Big Momma Sweet. That isn’t good. She puts men in the ground who don’t pay their debts. Jack also needs money to stop a foreclosure and to get a former foster mother out of a nursing home. She suffers from dementia but she’s the only person in his life he cares about, the only family he has. Jack might also be suffering from dementia, or some form brain damage that has robbed him of his memories, a likely consequence of being kicked in the head too many times.

Jack’s struggle to get out of debt, to get his life back on track, to do something for his foster mother before he dies, is sad because it seems so futile. In the story’s opening chapters, it seems clear that Jack, while well-intentioned, has little control over his life. Even if he can break out of the daze caused by his pain pills, it isn’t clear how he will overcome the cumulative impact of his bad choices before he loses his foster mother’s home to foreclosure. It isn’t even clear that he will outlive his foster mother, who may be entering her last days.

A former stripper named Annette enters the story while she’s traveling with a carnival, working as the tattooed girl. Annette’s life intersects with Jack’s in ways she doesn’t immediately understand. I won’t say much about Annette because revealing her story would spoil the coincidental surprises. I can say that, as a character, she has the right combination of damage and heart and toughness to make her appealing (although no fictional stripper has ever been created who wasn’t appealing). The same combination of damage and heart and toughness animates Jack, but he’s also appealing because he takes comfort in being who he is. He hasn’t lived a life most people would want, but he has lived the life he wanted.

The novel reveals secrets that Jack never suspected his foster mother was carrying. It builds tension as it moves toward a climax involving the possibility of one last fight, a fight that Jack might not survive. The ending could have gone in either direction, a fact that maintains suspense as the story reaches its climax. As was true of Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road, the humanity of the novel’s desperate and damaged characters shines through, conveyed by prose that manages to be both intense and understated.

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Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown & Co. on Feb. 7, 2017

Newly released from a Mississippi prison, Russell returns to the town where his father is waiting for him. Russell’s mother died while he was in prison and his father filled the unbearable silence by bringing a woman, an undocumented immigrant, into his home. In addition to his father, trouble is waiting for Russell, old scores that people feel a need to settle. Russell did something stupid but not malicious. He can’t put the crime behind him and neither can the malicious people who think he was not sufficiently punished for it. His former fiancé called off his marriage after he went to prison and now has three kids and a life she regrets. Russell isn’t searching for forgiveness or redemption, nor does he believe he deserves any.

Larry and his brother Walt are the key antagonists who trouble Russell during the novel. Larry isn’t allowed to see the son from his first marriage and his second wife is publicly and repeatedly unfaithful to him. Seeking revenge against Russell may be a way or restoring his sense of manhood.

The other desperate character in Desperation Road is Maben. Broke and homeless, she’s taking her daughter Annalee back to Mississippi because she has nowhere else to go. Desperate circumstances motivate her to take a desperate action. Soon enough, she needs to leave, but again has nowhere to go, no plan, no help, and no hope. Her road intersects with Russell’s a bit beyond the novel’s midway point. That part of the novel hinges on a large coincidence but coincidences happen. This one isn’t so outrageous as to damage the story’s credibility.

Some of the supporting characters are drunks and scoundrels, or just drunks, but other characters are living a responsible life, doing their best with what they have, which isn’t much. Michael Farris Smith’s muscular prose captures the rural southern characters who inhabit his novel (“Russell came across the pond bank and said how you doing old man and the old man grinned with his lips held tight to keep it from getting away from him and he gave Russell a solid handshake as if he’d just sold him a calf”).

I’m impressed with the humanity and understanding that shines through in this novel, the recognition that people are defined by more than their mistakes. Russell believes that rough lives get rougher and he doesn’t believe in fairy tale endings, but the reader hopes that he will manage to find a way out of his various predicaments.

In that regard, I’m also impressed with the suspense that Smith builds. Whether things will end well for Russell and Mabel is the question that hovers over the story. These are people for whom nothing ever seems to end well, so the sense of foreboding is palpable even as the reader roots for their survival. If they stay alive and stay out of prison, that’s the best they can expect. They are, in the novel’s words, “holding on,” and whether they can hold on a while longer is the question that keeps the reader involved with this quietly intense story.

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