Driftless

I read Winesburg, Ohio so long ago I can't remember anything about it except that it was a hybrid, a cross between a collection of short stories and a novel. The traditional novel has a hero or heroine, Huck Finn or Jane Eyre, for instance. In Winesburg, the reader has a window on a whole community. That's the case in David Rhodes' novel. The story starts with July Montgomery's return to Words, a town in an area of Wisconsin known as Driftless. Grahm Shotwell is a farmer barely hanging onto the land his family has owned for generations. His wife Cora is an assistant bookkeeper at a dairy co-op where she discovers that her employers are stealing. The beautiful and sensuous Gail Shotwell plays a bass guitar for a local band and works, unhappily, for a plastics factory. Pastor Winifred Smith serves her parishioners but dreams of having a child. Viola Brasso looks after her wheelchair-bound sister Olivia, and Olivia chafes at her imprisonment in her own body. Jacob Helm fixes machines and still grieves for his dead wife. There are other characters, and one thing Rhodes does really well in this novel is connect them all. The plot of this book is a little like that of a modern t.v. series that introduces multiple characters and multiple storylines over weeks of watching. All this is just the "mechanics" of novel writing, however. What I really like is Rhodes' characters. They are fully human, flawed yes, but wonderful too, just trying to make it through life like all the rest of us in the best way they can. Rhodes has some "word magic" for sure. I'm not religious in the traditional sense. I don't believe in a biblical, Old Testament God. I don't go to church. Nevertheless, I was captivated by Rhodes' description of Pastor Winifred Smith's encounter with God, with the life force all around us. It might sound like an LSD trip to some, but it's beautiful in any case: "She held this feeling for a moment and then realized something very uncommon was happening. The grasses in the ditch appeared to be glowing. The red, cone-shaped sumac tops burned like incandescent lamps in a bluish light unlike any she had ever seen yet instinctively recognized.... She looked at her hands and they seemed to be lit from inside, her fingers almost transparent. The light glowing within the grasses and the sumac glowed within her, within everything. They sang with her through the light, jubilantly, compassionately, timelessly connecting to her past, present, and future. Boundaries did not exist. Where she left off and something else began could not be established. Everything breathed." If Winifred encounters the sacred, other characters experience the profane--as when Wade Armbuster takes Olivia to a dogfight--but whatever Rhode's characters are doing, it's interesting. If you like this kind of story, a story that doesn't focus on a "main" character but on the interwoven lives of a group of characters, you might also enjoy Shelagh Shapiro's Shape of the Sky which takes place in small town in northern Vermont. Enjoy!