Reading Salvage the Bones as a Climate Novel

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, 2011 National Book Award fiction winner, is among the titles hit by a tidal wave of book bans in the Disunited States. It happens that this is also a climate change novel—not that the book banners raised that particular point.

Consider the storm:

“Makes my bones hurt,” Daddy said. “I can feel them coming.”

That storm—Katrina—is personal in this book, as all storms are to the people whom they hit. Only those lucky enough not to be slammed by such unnatural disasters have the luxury of viewing them only on the nightly news.

Here’s what the NRDC has to say about Katrina. They call the storm a “future in foreshadow”:

The Katrina disaster led to the largest—and fastest—mass migration in modern U.S. history, described at the time by Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor, “as if the entire Dust Bowl migration occurred in 14 days, or the dislocations caused by the Civil War took place on fast-forward.”

Location and dislocation are writ large in Salvage the Bones, even within the bodies of the characters, especially Esch, teenaged and pregnant, whose struggle to survive is at the center of the story. What leads to hope, however frail, is her fierce expression of who she is, and her tenacious, searching love of Greek mythology.

The storms of our time are certainly mythic in scope, and so is the storm in the book. The hurricane slamming on an impoverished town, with the family hunkered down, makes for some of the novel’s most compelling pages. Our real world storms, too, are visited upon us by the wanton missteps of people who do not know most of us, as the people giving the evacuation orders emphatically do not know know the Batiste family or care a jot about them. The motives of the perpetrators of the climate chaos we are in—the politicians and the multinationals who ignored and covered up the data—can be construed to be as complicated, yet as plainly selfish, as the whims for delight and vengeance that drove the Greek gods.

That insistent confluence of myth and life may be what keeps the book hopeful. It makes me want these people to make it through the storm and be safe, and seen to be safe, in a way they never were before it. Not an easy read but a most compelling one.