Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
Rash, Bathanti describes Wanda beheading a copperhead. She pins the snake to the ground with the barrel of a shotgun, steps on the creature with her bare foot, and proceeds to slice its head off with a filet knife. Then she says to George, “We live in a topography of snakes. . . . Mischief of the revolting sort is abroad. It is not an accident that the Lord allows the snake to prosper. A reminder to remain vigilant” (94). Vigilance is a major theme of the novel. Religious symbols and allusions occur throughout the narrative. Notions of sin and salvation are prevalent. The word purgatory appears frequently – and, in fact, George travels in a kind of purgatory from the beginning of the novel to the end. In most scenes, he is less an actor than an observer as he recounts various incidents of danger or violence. Bathanti is a writer concerned with the deep mysteries of existence, the ways in which the past influences the present and how circumstances, often beyond a person’s control, take over one’s life. In particular, he is sensitive to the defining – and confining
– aspects of religion and social class. He is also a writer who delights in the dramatic scene and brings the narrative to life with poetic language and vivid imagery. A phone booth is a “glass confessional” (51); caviar is “black as grease” (140); a switchblade is “an icy hypodermic” (193). In other passages, he evokes place and an acutely felt sense of the past in long, vividly descriptive paragraphs. Late in the novel, George returns to his boyhood home and rummages through a cedar chest that contains the most meaningful artifacts of his parents’ lives: Christening gowns and bonnets, bronzed baby shoes, my mother’s wedding gown, my parents’ wedding portraits, birth and baptismal certificates, my grandfather Giorgio’s delicate parchment Certificate of Naturalization, 1911. . . . The marriage certificate of my mother’s parents, Giovanna and Alphonso, 1915, also parchment, falling apart at the creases, ornate script and outdated gorgeous penmanship. . . . A lush Della Robbia zippered purse. Within a dozen rosaries. One I remember from my childhood somehow: crystal prismatic beads, silver crucifix stamped on its back with Italia, the Christ that hangs from it ivory. My
Acclaimed children’s author Frances O’Roark Dowell received the 2015 North Carolina AAUW Award for Juvenile Literature for her novel Anybody Shining (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2014), set in the North Carolina mountains in the 1920s. The author of fifteen novels, Dowell has lived in North Carolina most of her adult life. Read more about this author and about her other fiction in the interview with her published in NCLR 2006 and on her website. RIGHT Dowell receiving the AAUW award, presented by Mary Peterson at the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association meeting, Raleigh, 13 Nov. 2015
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mother owns rosaries the way seamstresses own thimbles. (226–27)
George goes on to find his father’s Purple Heart, his parents’ marriage certificate, their life insurance policies and wills, the receipts for their burial plots in the Catholic cemetery. All of the objects in the chest speak to his parents’ lives, all of them connected to significant life and death moments, many of them symbolic of their religious devotion. For George, who is on the run and feels he is in danger, the experience raises questions as to what has become of his own life, how one mistake has seemingly ruined his chances for success and happiness. As vigilant as he is trying to be, he doesn’t know what will keep him safe. “I don’t know if protection is God or a gun” (190), he muses. In The Life of the World to Come, Joseph Bathanti has created a bold and ambitious novel, a narrative of compelling drama, sensitivity and sadness, loss and loneliness. It is also a story that suggests the possibility of both tenderness and mercy. n
PHOTOGRAPH BY MATHEW WAEHNER; COURTESY OF THE NC OFFICE OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
FRANCES O’ROARK DOWELL RECEIVES THE 2015 NC AAUW JUVENILE LITERATURE AWARD
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