7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tough Underbelly in Blackbelly, October 11, 2005
This review is from: Blackbelly: A Novel (Hardcover)
Funny things happen when you face the truth: people begin to feel better about themselves. That's how it is in Blackbelly, a book full of small-town angst. Set in Sweetwater, Idaho, population "a long way from a shopping mall," the book's voice and cadence fits the landscape: plainspoken, unassuming and natural. Author Sharfeddin has crafted a compelling story around Chas McPherson, a 41-year-old who wants to be left alone to tend his flock of blackbelly sheep and do the right thing -- which includes helping his dad live out his last days at home. Intimidating as he is fragile, the senior McPherson is dying from late-stage Parkinson's. You can feel sorry for him, but it's not easy to like him. His freakish past as the town's fiery pastor includes calling people out for their sins. Now that he's mute and expressionless, we don't know what he's thinking, but he's apparently more alert than the people able to walk and talk around him. His silence looms large, adding dimension and tension between he and his son, and he and Mattie Holden -- the youngish nurse willing to put up with just about anything. Sharfeddin romanticizes nothing. The old ranch and house are a dump, the sheep are dirty, and the drinking gets hard. Above it all is an earnest sheriff who's trying to figure out who burned down the house of an Iranian-American family that -- good lord -- doesn't celebrate Christmas. Nicely drawn is how the characters' personal certainties unravel. Particularly touching are nurse Mattie's one-way, slightly awkward conversations with the old man, where she keeps him going by talking about everything from 16th-century fashion to random Bible passages, which she knows little about. She works hard. And she puts up with Chas, a small man on the exterior, but a big one inside. Why would a nurse take a job in the middle of nowhere? Why is Chas the town's number-one suspect for the arson? It's why I recommend it. Throw in never-die prejudices and the complexities of political correctness, man-made sins, forgiveness, and Sharfeddin delivers an even-handed novel that touch the truths of remembering too much.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive first novel, October 10, 2005
This review is from: Blackbelly: A Novel (Hardcover)
Bigotry, fear, and long, vengeful memories fuel the tension in Sharfeddin's striking debut, but it's her two main characters who capture the imagination and keep the pages turning.
Set on a sheep ranch in remote Idaho, the story opens with 41-year-old Chas McPherson answering a phone call. He's advertised for a live-in nurse so he can bring his father home to die, but so far he's had no luck. As he talks it's easy to see why. He's a man too used to his own unwanted company. He's abrupt and blunt, with no social skills.
As he talked, "He looked around his house at the piles of clutter and filthy dishes....When he hung up, he looked at the mess again, seeing it in a different light, now that someone was actually coming." He worked for three days clearing "decades" of accumulation, but it wasn't until the prospective nurse arrived that he realized he hadn't cleaned.
"The house wasn't cluttered now; it was sparse. He'd purged it of trash and memories alike, as if there was no distinction. But he hadn't scrubbed anything. And now, as she approached, he saw the dust, the grit, the coating of neglect on everything."
But Mattie Holden, a city girl from Spokane in her mid-30s, takes the job, and moves in immediately. Too relieved to question his luck, Chas quickly moves his father home and Mattie settles in to a lot more of the cleaning and cooking than she'd planned on. Chas' father is helpless and unresponsive, in the last stages of Parkinson's.
But there's an aura of strength about him, a presence that grows increasingly ominous. "He just seems bigger than he is," Mattie tells Chas. "When I turn my head I have this sense that he's enormous. It sounds crazy."
Chas, grudgingly attempting to co-exist, tells her how his father once killed a bobcat with his own hands. "Illness can't diminish a man like that." Slowly, haltingly, Chas reveals more. His mother ran away when he was 10; his big, powerful sheep-ranching father was a preacher with rigid, unforgiving standards. Chas himself is gruff and hard drinking, but thinks of himself as a man who didn't live up to anyone's standards, even his own.
Chas is a complex character, a man who looks just like his father but has none of the old man's rigidity. It doesn't take him long to realize Mattie has secrets, but he doesn't pry. When a valued customer, the only Muslim family in town, can't afford to buy the traditional lamb before Eid, Chas leaves one tethered to their porch and then denies having done so. He refuses to sign a petition banning Christmas trappings from the local school because, he says, it will only give bigots an excuse to lash out at the non-Christians.
A few days later the Muslim family's house is torched and Chas is accused of the crime. The sheriff, an outsider, assumes there must be something to it if everyone in town is convinced Chas is guilty.
Meanwhile Mattie is having more and more trouble sleeping, convinced Chas' father is haunting her, that he sees into the deepest recesses of her soul and her less than proud past. And maybe there's something to that. Most of Sweetwater thinks he has uncanny powers and hates him for it too, willing to visit all the old man's unforgiving destruction on the son.
The town's near-universal willingness to come together in hatred would seem far-fetched if it didn't happen so often in real life. Sharfeddin does a good job of portraying small town insularity and mutual reinforcement and builds the novel to a complex, layered conclusion.
Described in the jacket copy as a "contemporary Western," "Blackbelly" has all the elements: the whisky-drinking, principled, misunderstood loner; the troubled, secretive woman who draws him out, and the evil of lesser men, which threatens to destroy his life. But Sharfeddin's treatment of these elements makes them real, with shades of ambiguity throughout, conflicts not easily settled and no simple resolution. A bit battered by life, Mattie and Chas have learned from their mistakes and flaws (Chas more than Mattie), but not overcome them.
Sharfeddin, a sheep rancher herself, fleshes out the feel and smell of a sheep ranch. The book's title comes from a special breed of sheep, which the reader learns a fair amount about in the course of the novel, and the rhythm of the work (it's lambing time) creates a structured flow. An impressive first novel from a writer to watch.
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