Mini-Review: Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks

Suzan-Lori Parks, better known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, came out with her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, a few years ago. In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer interview, she called the work "a deep and reverent bow to William Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying,' which also has characters on a journey dealing with a dead relative."

It may be, but don't expect the complex southern saunter of language. Ms. Parks spares the page unneeded words with a beautiful economy, possibly the result of being accustomed to showing stories on stage through dialog and action. In this case, the use of shifting narrative points of view drives the action and yet circles back on it, like advancing the plot and character development through a spiral instead of a straight line. You keep coming back to previous point, stripping back layer after layer and showing the complexity not only of character, but of life. Other than saying that this journey is a quest for something valuable that may or may not be sequestered in a given place, I won't go much into the plot. What is important is not the arrival at the destination or even the destination itself, but the process of traveling. Perhaps that's what made it resound for me. Our final destination is, after all, physical death, so we have is the traveling. I also liked the use of dialect as a leveling factor. No matter how high and mighty some people might be in the social era of the time, the expression of thought and feeling was generally the same, showing more of a kinship than perhaps many of the people would have wanted to admit.