The Moonflower Vine, by Jetta Carleton
Those of you who follow my reviews know I'm EXTREMELY unhappy about contemporary fiction. The vast majority of books published in the last twenty years seem... loveless, self-conscious, and lacking any moral exploration. So I'm thrilled when I'm proven wrong.
I was browsing the bookstore up at St. John's University and found this gem, a successful novel that had gone out of print and was resurrected by Jane Smiley. Thank you, Jane. THE MOONFLOWER VINE by Jetta Carleton is what publishers would call a "quiet" novel--and then not publish today. But it's gorgeous. It traces the ethical dilemmas of each member of the Soames, a Missouri farm family, especially as they try to reconcile their passions with their faith. The descriptions of the natural world are delightful. This is a book suffused with love--love for place, for family (however confining and confounding), and especially for a moral, heartfelt relationship with the world, hard as it is to find.
Here are a few of my favorite passages. They're all comments on Christianity, which provides the cultural and moral compass for the Soames, but is by no means left unchallenged by Carleton.
"We ate our supper in the yard that night. As we gathered at the table, my father said, "Bless this food, O Lord, to its intended use... Bless our loved ones, wherever they may be, and grant, O Lord, that we may follow in the paths of righteousness..." What he meant was that he was grateful for the good smells and sounds of the summer evening, for the star impaled on the lightning rod, for fresh tomatoes from his garden. But he would have felt it pagan to state his pleasure in such plain terms. He said it in his own way, and no doubt the Lord can translate; He must have a lot of it to do in a day's work." 31
"Nowadays, perfectly respectable people went to shows on Sunday, they went dancing and played cards; lots of girls even smoked--and it didn't mean they were going to hell. Hell had shifted its location; it was farther away than people used to think." 259
I was browsing the bookstore up at St. John's University and found this gem, a successful novel that had gone out of print and was resurrected by Jane Smiley. Thank you, Jane. THE MOONFLOWER VINE by Jetta Carleton is what publishers would call a "quiet" novel--and then not publish today. But it's gorgeous. It traces the ethical dilemmas of each member of the Soames, a Missouri farm family, especially as they try to reconcile their passions with their faith. The descriptions of the natural world are delightful. This is a book suffused with love--love for place, for family (however confining and confounding), and especially for a moral, heartfelt relationship with the world, hard as it is to find.
Here are a few of my favorite passages. They're all comments on Christianity, which provides the cultural and moral compass for the Soames, but is by no means left unchallenged by Carleton.
"We ate our supper in the yard that night. As we gathered at the table, my father said, "Bless this food, O Lord, to its intended use... Bless our loved ones, wherever they may be, and grant, O Lord, that we may follow in the paths of righteousness..." What he meant was that he was grateful for the good smells and sounds of the summer evening, for the star impaled on the lightning rod, for fresh tomatoes from his garden. But he would have felt it pagan to state his pleasure in such plain terms. He said it in his own way, and no doubt the Lord can translate; He must have a lot of it to do in a day's work." 31
"Nowadays, perfectly respectable people went to shows on Sunday, they went dancing and played cards; lots of girls even smoked--and it didn't mean they were going to hell. Hell had shifted its location; it was farther away than people used to think." 259
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