Review: Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

Hillary Jordan won the Bellwether Prize for fiction from author Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Prodigal Summer, among many others), in recognition of literary merit and the novel's attention to social issues. TO be honest, this is the reason I decided to read it, because Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors of all time.

In Mudbound, Jordan explores the sharecropping south of the 1940's, a time of incredible paradox in the american south. One the one hand, regiments of african americans were fighting in WWII, fighting and dying alongside white soldiers to save the oppressed and hunted jewish (white) people. On the other, they themselves were oppressed, hunted people who returned to America to find their own status as unchanged. Even those who returned as decorated military veterans who had gained the respect and trust of their white european counterparts as human beings were still considered as animals in their own country.

Jordan highlights this paradox through a full-bodied cast of characters. Henry McAllen, a white military veteran, decides to act on a life-long desire to aquire a farm, to the shock of his wife Laura, who has never lived anywhere but the city. The shack and seemingly endless acres of mud, come with several families of sharecroppers, including the african-american Jackson family, whose son, Ronsel, is serving as a fighter pilot in the war. The arrival of Henry's charming brother, Jamie, at first appears to brighten the farm and counter the presence of the men's father, Pappy, whose heavy-handed attitude towards women and blatent racist hatred cast a blight on the entire family. When Ronsel returns from the war, however, Jamie's egalitarian attitude, coupled with his lure towards the furiously lonely Laura, ignite the powderkeg the farm has become, revealing an ugly truth and resulting in inevitable horror.

Jordan builds her story slowly, taking the time to flesh out each character's strengths as well as their less attactive hidden selves. Nothing is hidden, and in fact the different perspectives give the reader the ability to understand, if not accept, each person's motives and underlying insecurities. No one is blameless, and each bears the weight of the ultimate conclusion which, though not unexpected, is not for the faint of heart. As the characters are not spared from truth, neither is the reader.

This is an amazing debut novel, and it will be worth waiting to see what else Jordan is capable of.

Rating: five out of five stars; a vividly honest portrayal of an ugly part of American history