The marble orchard

I was longing to start a new reading journey to Kentucky and Alex Taylor made it happen with his nove, The Marble Orchard. Another first novel, another hit.

Kentucky is like a two face-coin : the neat horse racings, the finest stallions in the U.S and it’s rural habitat. The latter one is where the plot takes place. On the Gasping river which runs in the middle of limestone hills and soy and corn fields.  In that isolated place live the clan Sheetmire : the father, Clem, who still runs a ferry to go across the river,  barely makes ends meet at the end of the month. Only the local folks use it since a bridge was built a few years back. His son Beam works with him. Beam is shy and lonely and is wondering about his genes at this family gathering, he can’t help seeing how different he looks from his own folks. His life changes one day while he’s running the ferry. Beam finds himself on the run after killing a man who was trying to rob him. Beam calls his Dad for help. The man recognizes the victim : it’s the son of Loat Duncan, the biggest villain in the region and a cold-blooded killer. His son had just escaped jail a few days back. Clem summons his son to leave the State but nothing goes the way he wanted.

With Loat after him, Beam loses his trail and can’t escape the Gasping River. He ends up meeting strange people such as a trucker dressed in a suit or an armless brother owner, and his journey will take him to different places such as a cemetery, the road and the local joint. But no further. Deeper and deeper in the darkness, Beam will go while the past unravels.

The local sheriff, Elvis is also on his trail. Who will get him first ?

Another beautiful roman noir (black novel)  that immediately grasped my attention. And I should add a few words about the beautiful writing of Alex Taylor, his prose is magnificent. The location and the family bonds will remind you of Daniel Woodrell, one of my favorite authors. A novel where you know right from the first pages that this place is a prison and you can’t escape it.  Only the darkness awaits the characters. That region looks it has been forgotten by God and left to the Devil. Everything I loved !

I love the narrative choice, going from one character to another : Elvis, Beam, Beam’s mom, Derna or this despicable man, Loat. Taylor’s characters have a thick skin, a depth that I’ve rarely met. They grasp you and won’t let you go, no matter if they are the good or the bad ones. It seems as if they were all sent at the purgatory, and a few will escape at the end. I have this vivid image of the TV shows, Twin Peaks and Wayward Pines : these places you enter but can never leave. Alex Taylor lets his readers hope for a salvation but don’t offer the one you’d want.

I wish I had read this novel in English – but even though it was in French, I still could hear the Southern drawl, like the one I used to hear when I lived in Tennessee.

The Gasping river symbolizes the journey from life to death, from freedom to confinement. The prose of Alex Taylor, its lyrical style will affect you. While you read his novel, you can smell the scent of the earth, the smelling of the beer, of sweat. You can hear the river sing, its breaking surf. You can feel the humidity, the heat that strikes upon you.

Taylor writes about the misery, economical and intellectual, which prevails in that wasteland. The brothel is the place of the Devil, I wouldn’t go there for anything !

Alex Taylor lives in Rosine, in Kentucky. He teaches literature. He’s already published a collection of short stories The name of the nearest river, which received amazing reviews. That novel should definitely put Taylor into the top list of writers.

A must read.