Rebecca's Reviews > The Shore

(Nearly 4.5) Gritty and virtuosic, this novel-in-13-stories imagines 250 years of history on a set of islands off the coast of Virginia. As a Maryland native, I think of Chincoteague and Assateague as vacation destinations, but Taylor definitely focuses on their dark side here: industrial-scale chicken farms, unwanted pregnancies, domestic violence, bootleg liquor, gang rape, murders and meth labs. There’s a core of narratives set in the 1980s–90s that could easily form a novel on their own, but these are interspersed with vignettes stretching from 1876 to 2143. Dirty realism thus shares space with historical fiction and dystopia, while first-person narration (about one-third) trades off with third-person (nearly two-thirds) and one instance of the second person (“Boys”).

My favorite of the stories were the nineteenth-century ones about Medora, a half-Native American healer. These have a faint flavor of Wide Sargasso Sea, while there are traces of Ron Rash and David Vann in the rest. Taylor has proven here that she can do it all: contemporary realism, period research, even post-apocalyptic. Each of those genres could have spawned an entire book, but when crammed together they seem a bit show-offy, or like Taylor couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted the book to be. I also thought the 1980s–90s chapters were repetitive, with young women getting knocked up by dubious boyfriends.

Is The Shore short stories or a novel? That’s a question I’m still asking myself. I’ve heard Taylor’s approach compared to David Mitchell’s in Cloud Atlas or The Bone Clocks, but I haven’t read either (anyone who has, feel free to let me know how Taylor measures up). The compromise position says it’s linked short stories (like Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik, Unforgettable by Paulette Alden, or Archangel by Andrea Barrett), with characters and/or their ancestors/descendants showing up in later chapters. I think in the end I would have preferred a clearer choice: either a chronological novel or a straight set of short stories.

Still, there’s no denying that Taylor can write, and I loved tracing the history of some dying communities that are more than just names to me. Every region needs a literary chronicler, and I reckon Taylor is it for the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia’s islands. This was certainly a deserving entry on the 2015 Baileys Prize longlist. Next time, though, I hope she’ll commit to one genre or style.