Customer Reviews

The Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The title of my review says it all. "The Marrowbone Marble Company" is a work that will find a place in the canon of great American literature. Without question. Its scope is incredible, running from the hells of Guadalcanal to west-side Chicago horsetracks to the Appalachian foothills; through a nation at war with the world during WWII to its own internal war over segregation; down to interpersonal struggles (some tragic) between family, friends and neighbors that are immediately familiar.

Taylor weaves the story of the idealistic Marrowbone Cut families and their friends and enemies in the surrounding West Virginia environs through world-changing events beautifully with a true story-teller's grace. The attention to detail--both historical, emotional and technical (the art of glass marble production is fascinating)--is staggering. While a very serious tale, "Marrowbone" is funny to boot. This makes the work all the stronger. A character's quick, cutting retort or observation can be riotous, while also possessing a deeper meaning that cuts straight to the truth--much like real life. It's quite brilliant. Taylor's ear for the spoken word can be thanked for this. He writes dialogue like no other (those who have read his first book, "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart", can attest to this).

Simply put: This is one incredible book. A new American classic. Absolutely.

I admire the scope of this tough, ambitious book more than I ultimately enjoyed it. Early on, Taylor convinced me that this was going to be a character-driven book. But as the cast grew and the characterizations diminished, I ceased to inhabit it fully. The essential ingredient--individual portrayal--blurs into the larger themes of racial unrest within the genesis of the Civil Rights Movement. People became mere sketches. Except for the main protagonist, Loyal Ledford, the cast was populated by archetypes and one-dimensional figures. The author has a talent for earthy, gritty prose and his rendering of place is evocative. The soil and air of Marrowbone, West Virginia gets in your pores. But about one-quarter way through the book, it starts to meander, sag, and make its high points with platitudes.

Loyal Ledford was orphaned as a young boy in 1935 by a reckless, drunk father. He lingers in Huntington, West Virginia, tending the furnace at night at The Mann Glass factory and squires the boss's daughter, Rachel, a company nurse. During the day, he goes to the local college. But he suffers from ennui and abruptly enlists as a serviceman in World War II. He returns after the war a haunted man from the horrors he has witnessed and the things he has done in the name of war. He is reemployed at Mann Glass, this time as a supervisor; marries Rachel; and starts a family. He befriends a black employee, Mack Wells, who has been subjected to ignorant prejudice. At night, Ledford is infected by abstract dreams that carry uncertain messages, which seem to be juxtapositions of past and future. He turns to whiskey for solace, which gradually alienates him from his home life.

Ledford is thoroughly disgusted by racial prejudice at the workplace and in the county. He leaves Mann Glass and enlists the help of his distant relatives, The Bonecutter Brothers, in order to start up The Marrowbone Marble Company, an act inspired by his dreams. He persuades Mack to leave and come with him on this new venture. Loyal wants to do more than open a marble company. He desires to build a community that is based on kinship between black and white, a town that is built on integrity and the rights of human beings of all persuasions. One brick, one stone at a time, this town will grow to represent partnership and community between all ethnicities and colors.

He seeks out a scholar, Reverend Don Staples, who becomes his mentor in all things from philosophy to religion to basic human relationships. Staples is a gentle Christian, a thoughtful theologian, not a fire and brimstone preacher. Ledford quits drinking and reestablishes his role as husband and father. He is determined to put his demons at rest and forge a meaningful future at Marrowbone Cut. However, he also maintains a friendship with a fellow serviceman, Chicagoan Erm Bacigalupo, a crude man of little integrity--a bookie with mob connections.

It is a precarious undertaking to write a novel of race relations without tipping into the sententious and obvious. The author made it there by half, but it leaked around the edges. Don Staples became little more than a straw for Taylor's pulpit themes, and Rachel and Lizzie (Mack's wife) became mere wisps, undercut by the grandiloquence. In essence, the story was preaching to the choir (i.e. the reader). I do not need to be convinced that segregation was heinous, or to read pithy sermons about human decency and racial equality. I wanted to get back to the individual families.

Taylor's focus and cadence drifted as his architecture staggered under its own weight. He selected a few individuals to expand upon, such as Ledford's son, Orb. He gave him an Edgar Sawtell-ish construction, and his story, while precious, meandered until it also became fuel for the big battle of good vs evil. I felt cheated at the end. Taylor demonstrated an art for creating crisp and eccentric and fully realized characters at the opening of the book, then retreated from them and the story of two families--one white and one black--in order to fulfill his larger themes. Ironically, he filled his canvas with more and more characters--too many to handle with care--and I got weary of the soapbox, even though I agreed with his politics.

This could have been a five-star book; the author has a gift for storytelling, and, when he chooses to, solid characterization. The scenes of Ledford as a marine were powerful and the men in the corps were superbly depicted. The problems ensued when he traded out the rich and textured story for the grand platform. At that point, individuals became either caricatures or cursory sketches. Taylor gets his point across, and at times I was captivated; however, it was uneven and too often rhetorical. Nevertheless, I have faith in Taylor's skill as a writer, and I will undoubtedly be in line for his next book.

We live now, as the Chinese proverb says, in "interesting times." I read The Marrowbone Marble Company exhilarated by a singular and powerful idea: that in such times of extremity, the engine of change is still driven by people who are willing to shed hubris, temptation, and bias for what they know to be the right thing, a conviction that can never be achieved without critical mass. It's one of the many invaluable arguments Glenn Taylor makes in his sophomore novel. The setting is a symbiotic crossroads at one of the twentieth century's most dramatic historical moments; the prose is simple, straightforward, but never uninspired; and Taylor's characters are unforgettable. Read this novel and love it.

Loyal Ledford grows up surrounded by tragedy, and at age thirteen is left to raise himself simply and quietly. Being alone suits him, and he works hard, not making waves. He enlists after Pearl Harbor, eager to defend his homeland. Being sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, he learns the horrors of war and the fragility of friendships.

He returns to West Virginia an angry man, an alcoholic really, who is unable to cope when faced with cruelties in the world. He begins by shutting out the newspaper...he can't bear to hear of other tragedies in the world. As the civil rights struggles heat up, he is shocked and angered by a country that willingly lets blacks fight alongside whites, but then denies them the ability to sit together at a restaurant or on a bus. This disparity eats at him, until he thinks he's found the solution. He sets out to create a utopian community deep in the hills, one that allows people of different races to live side by side, work the land, and form a closeknit family structure, one that he never had. It works out beautifully, for a time. The success he finds eases his injured heart, and he begins to forget the ugliness of the War he fought.

However, word gets out about his community and he's labelled a Communist, and the new community faces its first real challenges: surviving amid the hate from the outside world directed at it. Things begin to go terribly wrong, and the inner person he thought he left behind returns.

This work of fiction is well-written and shows the different ways people try and repent from their sins....Ledford sincerely wants to make things right. The clue though, is that besides the newspaper, he then shuts out television, unable to cope with any sort of evil without taking it personally. It's apparent that he is only comfortable in a made-up world of his own making. When he is outside the community, his personality changes. However, he's a likable character and the story unfolds beautifully. A little too beautifully. His new community seems too ideal, the residents behaving perfectly, and a mutual understanding that is a little bit unimaginable. There are no disputes over housing, work, or food, and the ability for everyone to get along so well was unrealistic. Additionally, I kept wondering where the money was coming from, as money for this community and the new marble factory they build is never an issue. I thought that seemed a glaring omission, and it unsettled me throughout the last half of the novel.

Outside the depictions of war, this is a very peaceful book, a pleasant read that appeals because it represents an ideal most people yearn for. The underlying character study of Ledford is what makes it unique, and shows how complicated people are, and how difficult it is to flee from the past.

I received this book through the First Reads giveaway program on Goodreads.

Writing a review of M. Glenn Taylor's The Marrowbone Marble Company has been difficult for me - not because of the book itself but because determining where it fits in my reading experience and my life experience has been an elusive process. Covering the period from October, 1941 to January, 1969 - with a ten-year gap from 1953 to 1963 - the book could be "about" any of several things. The protagonist, Loyal Ledford, tends the furnace on the swing shift in a West Virginia glass factory until he enlists in the Army immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His experiences and the people he serves with in the Pacific are things that will continue to influence him long after the end of the war. On his return to West Virginia, he resumes his job at the glass factory, marries, and begins to raise a family. Unhappy with the hierarchy under which he works at the glass factory, he soon leaves to not only build a marble factory but a new community as well, based on what each member is able to contribute.

In June of 1963 I was a few weeks shy of my eighth birthday. In January of 1969 I was a semester and a summer - one that included the first moon landing and Woodstock - away from high school. My age and living in southern New Mexico during that time period meant that I didn't understand much about what little exposure I had via the evening news to the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, so reading about how a community in West Virginia experienced that time gave me a very different perspective on it. While reading the book, I fell into thinking that it was about the Civil Rights Movement but in the weeks since I turned the last page, the story has risen into my conscious thought on numerous occasions and I've come to realize that the point of the story is much more fundamental. It's about doing what's right and about learning that knowing what's right isn't always as easy as it should be. Loyal Ledford learns through hard lessons that what's right for one isn't always right for another and that subsuming one's own "right" to that of another or of a group can lead to bitter or disastrous results. Ultimately he learns that doing the right thing always involves a personal choice and that making that choice won't necessarily lead to the best results.

Taylor writes in such a way that you feel the protagonist's mood and frame of mind through the "voice" of the story. He develops his characters so well that if you were dropped into the Marrowbone community, you would know everyone there by sight. I enjoyed this book immensely and know that it will be with me for quite some time.

Glenn Taylor tells a big story with a deft lightness of touch. Covering the period from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, The Marrowbone Marble Company (and it's marble in the form of the glass marble game for children rather than the stone variety) tells the story of Loyal Ledford, a hard working man in West Virginia who marries the daughter of the glass factory where he works. Returning from a traumatic WW2, he decides to start his own business manufacturing marbles. If that sounds dull, it's far from it.

Taylor uses the device of moving the story on by devoting, often quite short, chapters to various months (in chronological order but not taking every month) to tell the story of the significant events and the not so significant events. I found myself having to check back each time to see how much time had elapsed between each episode, but that aside it works well.

It's a story of love, race, civil rights and a connection to the land and the pursuit of American ideals in the face of redneck resistance where community and inclusiveness of races (Loyal employs and lives with black and white families in what is akin to the old industrial revolution company towns, although here their location in Marrowbone Cut is more the size of a small village community) gets labelled as communism by the corrupt white political leaders and redneck locals.

The characters are richly, but lightly, drawn and all are nicely rounded with both faults and strengths giving a very real feel to these fictional characters. It's one of those books that I know is going to stay with me for many months and is a delight to read and I will definitely be seeking out Taylor's earlier novel and keeping an eye out for future books on this basis. His first novel has been likened to John Irving by the critics, and that's not wholly out of place but Taylor's style is distinctively his own and this is a highly recommended book.

I was very eager to read MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY as the background information sounds very intriguing. The book spans the years 1941-1969 a time of great change and excitement in the United States. The setting is Appalachia (West Virginia) an area about which I like to read. The protagonist, Loyal Ledford, is certainly interesting as he begins the book as a blue collar worker, has a life changing stint as a soldier in WWII then starts both a factory that manufactures marbles and a progressive community for his employees which is described as "a new vision of how life can be." Fascinating themes including race and class differences, prejudice, spirituality, folklore, war and peace, being "different", addiction, meaning of family, the 1960's are all touched on in the novel. Yet despite my initial high hopes the book soon became a chore for me to read. Part of the problem may be the large number of people depicted in the novel that I at least had trouble keeping straight. Though the author gives us adequate information about his characters they never really come alive and I often found myself paging back to remind myself who was who and why they were important. The book leaves the impression that the author was determined to utilize every possible thought and idea he had for this novel whether fitting or not leading to a tedious reading experience. Though not a particularly lengthy book (358 pages) MARROWBONE MARBLE COMPANY is in no means a quick or fun read and is ultimately quite disappointing.

Riveting! I couldn't put it down until it was done! The book was like a perfectly played game of chess with many strategies happening all at once but simultaneously seamless. Other friends have read it and it reads like an old American classic. This author tells as story that flows like a river in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia. I would give this 10 stars if they had it but I will give it 5+. If I can suggest a great present for friends, family or just a great summer or great vacation read - THIS IS IT!!! Buy this now. This should be a part of Oprah's book club. Enough said....you must see, read and love it for yourself.

This is not normally the type of book I read. I enjoy history and adventure-type books; I rarely read novels. However, I enjoyed this book (maybe because of the history covered). It was well-written, maintained my interest all the way through, and I also liked the main characters and the way everything ended (I can't tell you why as this would spoil it for you if you haven't read the book).

What is the reason the book was written? I don't know. And maybe that doesn't matter. I found it entertaining and enjoyable to read. I liked it. While I don't think it is a great book, I do think it is a good book.

Is this book about race relations? Is it about living in the south? Is it about the effects of war? Is it about small town corruption? Is it about substance abuse? Is it about the challenge of parenting? Is it about the struggles of a disabled child? Is it about growing up in the mid-twentieth century? Is it about insects that start to communicate with humans? Yes, this book is about all of these.

Please be warned: You will need a score card to keep track of all the characters as so many different people hop in and out of the book that you will have a hard time remembering who they are, if they are black or white and if they are good or bad. After a while I quit caring.

The book tries to express the power of human frustration over life, war and inequality but ends up collapsing under the weight of its own self-importance.