One of the Children Is Crying

by Coleman Dowell

Reunited by their father's death, the McChesneys, a prominent Southern family, still find bitter feelings divide them

313 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Born in Kentucky in 1925, Robert Coleman Dowell is one of the great post-war US writers. He is the author of 5 novels including One of the Children is Crying, Island People and Mrs October Was Here.

Coleman Dowell's short stories, as is much of his work, are difficult to contextualize, shatter prior conceptions of what fiction should encompass, and break away from previous fictive forms. Some of the stories include a rich, crafted Gothicism, others a compelling surrealism, and still others an expertly timed lyricism. Dowell's characters are multidimensional, sometimes moving through the stories at metafictional levels. They are always reacting to the alienation of self, attempting to understand flawed beauty, and desperately striving to focus on the numerous splintered fragments of their fractured lives. He died in 1985.

Reviews

[Ronald Morton]

[...] says to him [...] "Thank you, Mr. Price. No, he didn't suffer. Yes, it would be a blessing if we all could go that way"; hangs up the phone and thinks with pure passion: I hope I burn to death.

One Of The Children Is Crying is an excellent novel, deeply embedded in the mire and murk of the Southern Gothic tradition. In large part the book is about the reunion of a family after the death of the father. More specifically it’s about how families destroy one another, how lifetimes of resentment build and swell, and just how intertangled love and hate can really be. It also deals frankly with abuse, incest, racism, and insanity.

At the center of the story are the six adult children and their complex, mostly uneasy, relationships and rivalries with one another – shown through present action, as well as flashbacks and reminiscences littered throughout the novel. The novel is in great part a character study, with the family as a whole standing in for the “character”, and the family here is incredibly well written, and as such the work itself is very successful. The novel is written with a deft understanding of familial dysfunction, some bleak humor, a great deal of anger, but most of all it is written with a great deal of compassion for the deeply broken individuals contained within it.

It’s not a particularly pleasant read – there are moments of humor that provide flashes of light in the darkness – but it is a great read, and deserves to be more widely acknowledged and praised.