January 23, 2006
In Wallace's second beautifully written novel (after Blue Horse Dreaming
), the titular character is Jamie, a 17-year-old on the lam from being placed in a foster home after her mother's cancer death. She works for Margaret, an elderly photographer, in the small mill town Dyers Corner, where most residents are caught in a cycle of poverty and violence. Jamie arrives in the town, her grandparents' former home and her mother's birthplace, in search of her roots, but she becomes embroiled in a nasty debacle after she frees a disturbed young boy who was lashed to a tree. Wallace's prose is lush and spare ("unrepentant after his absences, unrepentant in drink, bridging with his body the chasms that lay between one unkindness and the next"), and she handles both the grotesque and the gorgeous with equal skill. A tender, tragic love story between Jamie and Galen, a trapper twice her age, together with a suspenseful pursuit story, brings the novel to a dramatic close. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel would devolve into melodrama, but Wallace never lets its chilly, destitute atmosphere lapse.