Customer Reviews

Chalktown

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I saw that Melinda Haynes had come out with a new book, I almost didn't read it. I had tried reading Mother of Pearl and just couldn't get into it at the time. But I saw a copy of Chalktown at the library and decided (since it wouldn't cost anything) to give it a go. I am so glad I did. I was caught up in the story from the beginning and it was all I wanted to read. Even when I was doing other things, my mind kept wandering back to the book and I was itching to pick it back up. I found the writing to be harsh at one moment and then poetic in the next. I found myself wrapped up in several of the characters and couldn't wait to find out what would happen to them. When one thing happens towards the end (I won't say what), I actually yelled out "oh no"!! Now that I have caught on to Melinda Haynes style of writing and story telling, I am going to start reading Mother of Pearl again. I know I will be happy that I did.

The South is known for its incredible women writers - and now, with the publication of Mother of Pearl and Chalktown, Melinda Haynes can be added to that list. Melinda Haynes shouts from the top of a Southern pine with a voice that can, by God, break glass. I've never read anything like Chalktown in my life! I was completely willing to follow Hez and Yallababy to the end of the earth. I can't fathom where in the world Melinda came up with that plot! Chalktown is mysterious, bewildering and surprising. It is also gorgeously written and lavished with the tangled oddities that make the South the South.

In 1961, Chalktown, Mississippi is a tiny village consisting of mostly a dirt road lined by the shanty homes of sharecroppers. Families communicate with their neighbors mostly through chalkboards that hang off the front porches of their houses.

Just down a spell from Chalktown lives the dysfunctional and impoverish Sheehand family, whose patriarch deserted them several years ago. Abusive mother Susan loosely raises her three children. However, in reality, the nearest thing to positive nurturing is sixteen-year-old teenager Hezekiah, who tries to help his rash sister Arena and his mentally incompetent brother Yellababy.

However, Hez seeks adventure perhaps to hide from his dismal existence. With Yellababy tied to his back, he journeys to the local metropolis of Chalktown, planning to uncover the mysteries of the community as a means of escaping his gloomy present and his ugly past with seemingly nothing but a drab helpless future to come. However, with the hopefulness of the young, he will still seek a brighter future.

CHALKTOWN is a period piece that brings to life the late fifties and early sixties in rural Mississippi. However, the story line is that and more as it is a coming of age tale as Hez finds the eternal optimism of youth that one person can change the future for the better. With this novel and MOTHER OF PEARL, Melinda Haynes is stepping closer to earning the Faulkner mantle of consistent superb writer of the Southern novel.

Harriet Klausner

I was very disappointed in Melinda Haynes' second book. I started with great interest and enthusiasm, having found Mother of Pearl such a gem. The story has an interesting beginning, and I was intrigued by the characters- especially a young boy who is severly brain damaged and his brother. After a detailed introduction into this family, and all of its dynamics- the book suddenly shifts to fifteen years earlier. At this point the book looses all explaination. It becomes confusing and uninteresting. The characters lack depth- and there is a mystery that the reader should be interested in but isn't. I have been reading all summer and asking myself "why" with every page that I turn. I am looking at this novel as a short story- forgetting all but the first part of the book. Too bad to be so dissapointed after having been so thrilled by Mother of Pearl.

Melinda Haynes is a talented writer! In "Chalktown" she has managed to exceed the skills she demonstrated in her first novel, "Mother of Pearl." The author successfully describes a motley crew of characters with their problems, idiosyncrasies, faults, failings, strengths and charms.

Haynes vividly describes grinding poverty, lack of education and racism. Hez, for example, is largely uneducated. His preference is to skip as many school days as is allowable by the educational system. Yet, for his apparent lack of smarts and social skills, he has heroic qualities. A neglectful family, that can hardly be called a family at all, makes his caring and protectiveness of Yellababy his impaired brother, all the more difficult. Fairy, the ostensible family head, spends more time with his former wife than with his present wife and children. Wife and mother, Susan-Blair, has struggled with alcohol and her main means of survival seems to be her failed entrepreneurial efforts with a consignment business. The family's one daughter is an on-again, off-again runaway who is headed for trouble because of her clandestine relationship with a mysterious county worker.

The characters are well drawn with all main characters having vivid personalities, quirks or charms. Each chapter is short and seems to tease and urge the reader on to find out why "Chalktown" is so odd. Why do folk only correspond via chalk and chalkboard? Why are they so bound together even though some obviously harbor feelings of suspicion and hatred toward one another? AND, who (really) dunnit?

Even the ending is a surprise. A fine read!

While a part of me wants to say that Melinda Haynes is traveling familiar territory with Chalktown (the inscrutable and savage God who rules in Flannery O'Connor's stories is also operating here), I also think she has something special of her own worth a second and deeper look. What that is, is her total success in getting you inside the heads of people who are desperately and permanently poor in worldly goods, in mental acquirements, and somehow still richly endowed with the spirit. O'Connor shows you the thought processes of such people, but she doesn't really MAKE you identify with them. Haynes doesn't exhibit that quality of totally detached observation of her characters, she makes you get into their hearts rather than just observe their thoughts. And what thoughts! It's as though through the filter of ignorance, trashiness, desperate conditions, incurable ills, and the unfairly imposed burdens of bigotry, God can only be known in his most extreme and wierd manifestations--yet he CAN be known. Christ shows up here as a healer who is also an adulterer and a criminal, as a profoundly abused child, as his barely literate but compassionate brother, as an artist whose canvas is the inside of his house, as a man with a ravaged face and a ravishing garden. And the Holy Spirit invades the story, as impossible hope for what we wish were possible, as realized healing that no one would wish on his worst enemy, as revelatory dreams of forgiveness for what was never really a crime. All of these manifestations are bracketed between two most interesting characters. The first, Marion Ulysses Calhoun, is a black man who has all the civilized virtues and rationality for which his white neighbors go lacking. He is kind, frugal, a careful farmer and a fine steward of his home and his tractor, and a good father to the neglected Hezekiah and Yellababy. He gives us a civilized place to stand in all the craziness, and he sees God as mysterious, but liking a good joke same as everybody. At the other end of the spectrum is Susan-Blair, a woman who has been 'saved' from her drinking, but has been soured in the saving into a viciously uncaring and abusive mother inundated in the borrowed offscourings of other peoples lives. The nasty geese, with their necks snaking together 'like Medusa's locks' that inhabit her yard are the outward and visible sign of her spiritually wasted soul--she has literally turned her youngest child to stone. There are some untidy loose ends in the book (why did that preacher wind up in jail?), some disconcerting time jumps that could have been smoother, and some overwriting--three similes a sentence is sometimes too much. But I thought it was a great story for all that. I'll be reading it again, and for me, that's a test of whether I thought the author has something to offer beyond a page-turning plot.

Melinda Haynes' new book, Chalktown, fulfills the promise I thought I saw in her first book, the Oprah selection Mother of Pearl: This woman will write a notable literary work. Taking nothing away from Mother of Pearl, which introduced us to Ms. Haynes' ability to lay words before us that freshened our perceptions, Chalktown moves into the realm of allegory with its allusive action, its revelations of what is really important about living, and its unsentimental portrayal of human frailty.

If one expects "the usual" from this book, one will be disappointed. The neat solutions and straw figure characters of most current fiction are not here. Chalktown is no quick read, for one finds oneself stopping to allow oneself the satisfying practice of divergent thinking. The characters and plotlines are not closed loops; the reader finds multiple routes to interpretation and sighs over the surfeit of Ms. Haynes language as well.

Hmmm...I don't think these other reviewers are particularly judicious in throwing their stars around. I thought Mother of Pearl was a good book, but Chalktown was a weak follow-up. Some real sloppy moments of prose, not enough character development, and a rather ridiculous premise that Haynes was unable to make work.

I got Chalktown on Holy Saturday afternoon. I started reading it on the hour drive for Easter Vigil with my mother. I read aloud to my wife as we drove; the pacing nicely suited to my voice, though totally out of sync with the potholes.

I reached the spot where Marion realizes that a body can't ever leave a place just as the light got too bad to read on. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the near dark waiting for the lighting of the Pascal Candle and seeing things in St. John's that haven't been there in up to 50 years. The stations that were once painted plaster instead of the current brass rectangles, and the floor grate where this altar boy had to kneel while we paused for readings, and people gone and dead. Marion's discovery engraved itself on my lower bifocals; I had never left that church where I was first communioned the spring before Mike K** was run down and I made my first funeral, where I was confirmed, and somehow, with my 86-year-old mother, I am still there in the improbable year of 2001.

Reading, for me , involves as much creativity as writing, and I have been extremely creative with Chalktown, but it has taxed my imagination to keep up with Haynes. I took two shortcuts I hope I shall be forgiven for. The preacher and Susan-Blair became the Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters characters from the movie Night of the Hunter. "Suffer little children to come unto me," keeps popping though my head, and I keep seeing her George County in terms of the harsh black and white cinematography of that movie, even though the words are a Jackson Pollock profusion of chromatics. (Maybe that is the wrong painter, Aaron's face made me think of the face in Munch's Scream). I also had this uncomfortable feeling that she was holding a mirror in front of me. Especially when she mentioned that the guy I keep trying not to identify with had named his bus the Blue Goose, one of my old CB handles. And I was 16 in 1961 and Cathy's real name was Becky.

I rode her time machine into a world I find almost as hard to understand as reality. And as with Mother of Pearl, I find myself wanting to ask a thousand questions. Since she isn't here, I have to answer them for myself. I like my answers, but someday I want to ask the author. I hope the media professionals who pass imprimaturs on a book are supportive, but just reading from the way the publisher tried to pigeonhole Haynes on the dust jacket, I wonder. I know, I once compared her to Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. But that was because I wanted to set a measure of the artist as a new face. That art is now a given with Mother of Pearl. Wonder if critics will understand that, or in a failure of imagination put her in someone else's garden.

Damn!!! All the above was written with 100 pages to go. Like commenting on Don Giovanni or Romeo and Juliet without the last act. With that ending, they ought to be comparing her to O. Henry. Before I got there the book had me crying and laughing, and living with those people. Melinda Haynes made me think. took me to some places I don't often visit. And by the way, chased me to my Atlas of Mississippi to look up the real George County, where I found Fig Farm Road.

This was a nice story and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The author is currently one of my favorites. She developes her charactors and story lines very well and I'm always anxious to pick the book up and see what's happening.