LOW COUNTRY: A Memoir. By J. Nicole Jones. Catapult. 240 pages. $26.
Operating under the theory that if there are family skeletons in the closet you may as well make them dance, J. Nicole Jones sets them to jangling across the generations of a family beset with misogyny, dysfunction and dashed dreams.
Reading “Low Country,” the South Carolina native’s first book, is like listening to a country music song written by Dostoyevsky (lots of crime, but the wrong folks getting punished), with Tom Robbins as his side man. And a little Tennessee Williams thrown in.
There’s no doubt this talented young woman can write, often brilliantly. Many a passage of this familial strife and personal coming-of-age chronicle fairly hums on the page, amplified by sharp observation, razor-edge emotion and a delicious turn of phrase.
The author’s love-hate relationship with her family and her hometown of Myrtle Beach is understandable, given Jones’ traumatic experiences and resentments. Her distaste is not only for the Grand Strand area, where her clan made a pile in hotels and seafood restaurants then lost it chasing a rainbow, but for the region in general.
“I am no longer a resident of the Low Country and don’t reckon to be again in this life,” writes Jones, who today splits time between the Brooklyn borough of New York City and Tennessee.
The book opens on a mournful tenor which is generally sustained throughout, though with a magma chamber of rage just below the surface. Jones’ eccentric use of language, while arresting, could have used judicious cutting, the digressions particularly. Editing can be a tightrope walk between retaining the author’s distinctive voice and reining in her more self-indulgent impulses. And sometimes Jones overplays her hand, extending a delightful phrase past the breaking point. Wonderful descriptions, metaphors and similes compete with strained ones.
But she also peppers the text with jaunty lines: “What is tradition if not a truce with the unknown?” or “Come take a ride on the Ferris wheel that spins like a prayer at the edge of the world.”
However, this product of the 1980s and '90s sometimes seems stuck in a 1950s frame of the mind. Either that or her father’s side of the family never emerged from a time when husbands were autocrats, sometimes violent, and wives kept silent. If she is unrelentingly hard on men, some of it is richly deserved.
“I come from a line of women for whom being walked all over and jumped on for the fun of cruelty was progress. The ironing out of accent was a way to fool myself into believing that I could be different than those women who suffered to make me.”
It seems the only good thing Jones has to say about the opposite sex is reserved for her beloved Grandpa, her mother’s dad — Santa Claus to her paternal grandfather’s Torquemada. Still, that she comes from a family of storytellers and songwriters is obvious. And the smatterings of history, ghost and pirate stories she offers lend leavening to the gloom (though the specters slide into silliness).
Still, she knows her part of the country all too well.
“The South does not own tragedy, but it sure seems to have taken a liking to the region,” said Jones, who received her Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from Columbia University. “And why not? The climate’s pleasant, and the folks are nice enough to your face. ... It’s true nobody minds her own business, but why would you want to keep quiet when gossip comes with a fat slice of pound cake and a blessing offered to offending hearts.”
At its best, her debut effort exhibits some daring experimentation, rich character sketches (especially of her father and grandmother), and a lot of heart.
Jones’ memoir is as much a triumph of style as of substance, but this Southern “gothic” never flags. Just be prepared for a pinch of arsenic in the shrimp 'n' grits.
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Review: 'Low Country' a sharply observed memoir of family strife and coming of age - Charleston Post Courier
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