Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"All you care about is being happy. I....I can't have that, that ain't an option.", April 30, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
C. E. Morgan's first novel, ALL THE LIVING, ought to be destined to become a classic. It should be read in classrooms, and then again later by people who have soaked up more life experience than young students -- or for that matter, than Aloma, its central protagonist -- so they can better appreciate the hard lessons imparted.
It is Orren, Aloma's lover, who speaks those implacable words (above) about happiness. He is a young man determined to make a go of the tobacco farm he inherited when his mother and brother died. He's tied to the land by grit, grief, duty, and sheer stubbornness, and he wants to do everything by himself. Aloma was three when she lost her parents, so she is as alone in the world as Orren. This, and their primal attraction to each other, is why she agreed to come live on this subsistence farm. But, blessed with musical talent on the piano, she isn't tied to the land in thought or action. She has ambitions for herself. She desires escape from the dreary and lonely life there, and she wishes to expand herself as a pianist. Enter the pastor in nearby Hansonville, who, at Aloma's behest, hires her to play for his church's services. He is single and, again, because Aloma implies it, thinks she is also. But these are not frivolous characters, and this is no salacious melodrama. ALL THE LIVING doesn't shy away from honest sexuality, but it isn't so much concerned with extreme acts of betrayal (erotic or otherwise) as with the subtler, internal struggles of men and women.
Morgan earned a master's degree in Theological Studies and puts it to good use by applying a vibrant undercoat of spiritual philosophy to her novel. The constant opposition between male and female, silence and expression, solitary habits and sharing, outright meanness and passive aggressive tactics highlight the harsh realities about merging as a couple -- particularly when love is such a submerged part of the equation. The author also counters light and dark, drought and deluge, mountains and bottom land to underscore the natural suspense that human beings are additionally dealt by God's creation. Life and death on the farm, and the fundamental tension between survival and higher pursuits contribute too to the characters' grapplings. Happiness, ALL THE LIVING argues, is a superficial goal because existence from moment to moment is a tumultuous and simultaneous wrestling with the beautiful and the ugly. What counts is endurance in commitments and bone-deep unions. The question is, will these people step up to that uncompromising reality?
This novel's crisp, slotted language, redolent with the cadences of Kentucky rural talk, and brimming with both casual and profound insights works economically, at the bone. Morgan wastes no words. She casts light and shadow with a steady and wise hand, leaving us to see stark contrasts and rough splendors. ALL THE LIVING, Job-like, questions the ordering of nature and the cosmos. Perhaps more importantly, it meditates on what constitutes human maturity. It SHOULD become a classic.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"We all got schooling darlin...", July 10, 2009
I've waited a while to write anything about this novel. For me, "All the Living" is one of those rare books that turns inside your head for weeks after you've finished reading. It's an incredible work. I keep changing my opinion on whether I like Aloma and Orren. They've been thrust into an extremely difficult and adult living situation, but are still children in many ways... and often act like it. They are in the throes of that period of early adulthood where most have the room to freely explore human relationships, both sexual and platonic. Aloma and Orren do not have this luxury. Their physical environment has them tightly boxed and, as a reader, I can feel them suffocating. It's the sort of brink living situation that either forces collapse or induces a surrender to some divine authority. This is an idea that is inherent in Bell's sermons (which are astonishingly written).
Morgan's use of the language is adventurous and, in several places, absolutely breathtaking. The dialogue is pitch perfect.
This book has garnered some buzz in the literary world, and it deserves more. Read it.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Strange that she could want to be here and at the church...yet feel that no matter where she [was] she would be nowhere.", April 3, 2009
In this assured and evocative debut novel set in rural Kentucky, author C. E. Morgan comes closer to conveying the essence of life, as she sees it, than do most other novelists with generations' more experience. Here Morgan recreates the bare bones lives of subsistence farmers who are irrevocably tied to the land, a land which is sometimes fickle in its ability to sustain those who so lovingly tend it. Orren Fenton is just out of college when he inherits the family's tobacco farm upon the deaths of his mother and brother. Three weeks after the funerals, Orren asks Aloma, his young lover, to come back to the farm with him. Aloma, an orphan from the age of three, is a pianist at the school she attended, and she sees this as her chance to begin a whole new life--a real life of her own.
Aloma and Orren are very young, and the work of running the farm is brutal. Orren cannot afford the time to teach the inexperienced Aloma what she needs to know to help him, and Aloma is left to try to strip the floors, wash the walls, and try to make the old family home inhabitable. The piano there is unusable. Before long, these two inexperienced young people are at each other's throats. Aloma feels abandoned all day, while Orren feels that she does not appreciate his work. His suggestion that she practice the piano at a church in town leads to her meeting with a local preacher, Bell Johnson, a single man who is attracted to her and who represents a different way of life.
Within this simple framework, Morgan explores universal themes: one's dreams for the future vs. the brutal realities of the present, new life and the hopes it represents vs. death of loved ones, the feeling that God watches over all vs. the sense that God is more interested in the land than in individuals, and the belief that self-knowledge comes from one's relationships with the outside world vs. the understanding that self-knowledge grows from within. Morgan writes with the deeply religious sense that all life is somehow connected, and that God is part of a continuum that begins with the land, the place where life begins.
The three main characters here--Aloma, Orren, and Bell Johnson--are fully developed, and Morgan does not need to tell us how they feel: their reactions to what is happening to them are so fully realized that the reader knows how they feel. She excels at recreating a person's inner feelings with exactness, and her description of nature, while sometimes gorgeous, is always balanced shortly afterward with realistic images of its fragility. Frequently using nouns as verbs, she compresses images, talking about Aloma "basketing the eggs," about Bell's father agreeing " to reverend the church," and the farm's rooster "tightroping the empty crib."
In the conclusion, Morgan reconciles the conflicts as well as Aloma and Orren might be expected to reconcile them, given their youth, but she leaves it up to them, and the reader, to decide whether they will find self-knowledge as they deal with the challenges in their lives. Sensitive, insightful, and beautifully developed, this portrait of three characters trying to understand themselves and their roles in the wider world is one of the most accomplished novels of the year. n Mary Whipple
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