Rattlebone by Maxine Clair
“From the soft bluff, I could hear the rush of the river above the hum of locusts. A fingernail sliver of moon laid out the highway gray and bent. The Little Dipper tilted. I struck a match and lit the green stem [of the cherry bomb]. When it sizzled, I threw it high and far, exploding the whole summer.”
I’m only religious insofar as I believe in the singularity of the human mind. I believe in words and worlds crafted by human intelligence. Bookstores are my church.
When I walk into a bookstore, I feel both at peace and expectant. I go with a list of books I’m seeking. I go, too, with a kind of open-ended prayer, hoping to encounter something I didn’t know I needed.
In March, I went to LA (for the yearly Associated Wring Programs—AWP—conference), and I was at a low point creatively, politically, humanly. My blood pressure was too high, my inner resources running on empty. When I stepped inside Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Los Angeles, a welcome space opened up in my chest. The shop is a light-filled room, its art books glistening on shelves like stained-glass windows.
I felt an immediate hush and hum in my body, and I let it guide me. Within minutes, I found the book I needed but didn’t know, in a corner of staff-curated works from small and independent presses: Rattlebone by Maxine Clair, a gorgeous publication by McNally Editions, which aims to reissue books that “have stood the test of time.”
When it was first published in 1994, Rattlebone received the Literary Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. The book is a novel-in-stories, centered around the life, family, and dreams of Irene, a girl growing up in Rattlebone, a close-knit, Kansas City neighborhood in the segregated world of 1950s America. The characters in Rattlebone are alive and sympathetic, the stories engrossing, and the individual narratives add up to a sweeping, hopeful coming-of-age story.
What I love most is Clair’s precise, reverent prose. Each sentence is a crystalline procession of imagery and detail, conveying the characters’ innermost doubts, as well as the startling beauty of the natural world. Clair is especially brilliant at endings. Her passages often revel in the tangible allure of objects, nature, and people, then open outward to question that very allure and what it means to be alive. The final paragraph of “The Great War” moves along this route with meticulous sensitivity and longing:
“It is dusk. Everything is suspended. A day that started brilliantly and burned along a steady course, now treks so deeply into darkness that it has lost its way. Pearlean combs her hair. Her husband is working late. Who does she love? What is love, anyway, but a silly, groundless thing she made up in her head. Once it was handsome, tender, kind, rich, smart. Once it could sing sweet, talk good, pray out loud and surely dance. What is it made of? What is there to love? What is there in anyone to love?”
What a paragraph! An encounter with a writer’s singular, spectacular mind. Sharp, mournful, attentive, and elegant, the prose inspires through its expansiveness. And, in spite of the unanswered questions we’re left with, Clair reassures us through her confident rhythm and structure. That kind of writing is a gift; I feel my blood pressure lowering as I read each glimmering sentence.