Customer Reviews

Q Road : A Novel

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As carefully stitched together as a patchwork quilt, with colorful squares made of quirky characters, the inhabitants of Greenland Township, Michigan, are bound by the commonality of their daily labor and innate love of their farmland. This is the heartland of America, land that has sustained generation after generation. But as much as a failing farm economy, suburbia encroaches upon this pastoral existence, and city people are willing to tolerate only so much discomfort in their newly constructed rural environment. Once sprawled across the countryside, secure from city confines, the old families are slowly replaced by pre-fab housing developments.

Q Road's three main protagonists are strikingly different people, each with particular idiosyncrasies, forming their own core family: father, child-bride, and son, love filling the solitary loneliness so long entrenched in their hearts. The spirited 17-year-old Rachel, a new bride who has married for the security of owning land, smashes through life with no guidance or socialization, save that of her own invention. George Harland, her middle-age-plus husband, is a sixth-generation farmer who knows only that his days are suddenly more bearable with Rachel sharing their backbreaking work and love-drenched nights. George cannot imagine life without Rachel.

When twelve-year-old David is drawn to the Harlands, it is for George's fatherly protection and Rachel's pure female strength, his own mother ever more distant and self-involved. On a clear day when trouble hovers in the air, David is the catalyst for catastrophe, his one breach of judgment forever changing the landscape of their future. For the three of them, life will never be the same again.

The Darwinian inevitability of nature vs. progress lurks around the perimeter of Greenland Township and Campbell skillfully portrays the hardships and realities of farming, as even the vigorous landscape becomes a vital player in the drama. Campbell's reality is hard-edged and she never shies away from its blunt and often brutal surfaces. Yet the eccentric characters of Q Road fit snugly into the environment, their own edges sharpened early by experience.

Q Road is like an Alice Hoffman novel with sharp teeth and a rapacious appetite. At the same time, the peculiar township inhabitants have many of the intransigent qualities of Carolyn Chute's Beans of Egypt, Maine. Sprinkled with quirky individuals, neighborhood malcontents and busybodies, Q Road is overflowing with the many faces of humanity, as they reach bravely toward their better selves. Luan Gaines/2003.

While I picked up this book because of the story's location, (outside Kalamazoo, Michigan where my daughter lives,) I was immediately drawn into this rural world peopled by an array of eclectic and sympathetic characters struggling with the onslaught of family farms being devoured by development. The plot revolves around one man's attempt to continue farming against the odds (and fate itself.) While the theme is both grand and timely, it is the people who live on Q Road that make this book one of the most absorbing books I have read in some time. Bonnie Jo Campbell has a gift for bringing a range of characters to life, and every one is both unique and believable and unlike any characters that have gone before. Parts are so beautifully written I had to read them several times, just to feel the goosebumps raise up on my skin from the sheer beauty and power of her words. When I finished, I wanted to begin again, for I was reluctant to leave these people and this world behind. I came away feeling that I had lived this story and cared deeply about the characters and most importantly about the land itself.

Q Road is not for the faint of heart. Author Bonnie Jo Campbell takes you down a Michigan side-road to a rough-hewn world of brutally flawed characters. No sparkling wits, no dreamy introverts here; rather these misshapen and misfortuned people struggle through each and every day. Cantankerous and eccentric, they are driven to alienate kin and neighbors alike. Victims of violent acts of their past, broken marriages, rural recession and self-abuse, they gain pleasure from the misery of others.

Around them caterpillars are splattered under the wheels of cars, crows munch the remains of road-kill squirrels and cats devour birds, all in a landscape haunted by the death-march of the indigenous Potawatomi Indians. Out of this harsh reality, Campbell builds a story of grittiness, purpose and great humor that is suddenly jarred by a tragedy. An act of carelessness not malice, it threatens to overwhelm the community and break their spirit.

In Campbell's competent hands, there is no hysterical reaction and no desperation, just people digging deeper and accepting less. Q Road becomes a road to recovery. No giant steps, no minor miracles, just a poignant reminder that the human spirit needs just small kindnesses to prevail.

Bonnie Jo Campbell has, rightly, been described as a fresh new voice in American literature. This, her first novel, should be the launching point for a distinguished career.

It would be wrong of me not to plug this book, since I can
remember nothing in the last couple of years that is both
stirring and still steeped in mystery. This book glows with the land-bound energy of thousands of lives, and not a wooly bear or
black eyed susan can do anything if not reverberate against the template of all that human despair and exhilaration in the name of survival. Larry Brown and Chris Offutt are peers, but Campbell is more evocative than Brown, and more subtle than

Offutt. It's erotic
and devastatingly funny, but when you finish there is a gestalt
one feels, because the love of the land AND its inhabitants (the two go together) in this thing grows larger
as you read, and the small, individual scenes sink into the book's larger purposes, which is to lament, with love, the present tense as it slides past, turning into history, the kind of history that is writ large in landscapes when one is attentive. In the past I've thought I've heard voices in old ruined houses, at dusk, out in some woods, and Q Road reminds me of those small transcendent moments on earth. There are plenty
of stories embedded in this novel, and they all smolder beautifully together. I loved this book, and I hope a million readers discover Q Road and Bonnie Jo Campbell.

The pleasurable "Q Road" provides the reader with a genuine experience of rural Michigan coupled with characters who have grown from this place, whose lives are a reflection of their landscape.

The story, centered on an irascible, oft-cussing brute of a girl (Rachel) and her relationship with an ageing farmer (George), allows the reader to become engrossed in a landscape rife with contrast. The primary arc of the novel encompasses a few years from the late 1990's. Aside from the quirky and delightful love story between Rachel and George, as well as a few other minor arcs concerning the loveably flawed residents of Greenland Township in Kalamazoo County, the novel is a study on the friction between people with fundamentally different views on how their landscape should be shaped.

Rachel, along with her mother Margo, live off the land, hunting and skinning their meals with ease, as one with the natural environment as possible. George is caught in between. As a farmer he maintains an intimate relationship with the land while at the same time experiencing the near futility of his occupation with the constant pressures of money and labor. Then, with an assortment of characters, the rural/urban divide is examined through the clashes between wealthy developers, a middle class fleeing the city, and those who (like the Potawatomi in another arc of flashback skillfully threaded through the narrative) are forced to respond to the invasion.
A terrific, fast read. Highly recomended for anyone who loves the beautifully rugged ladscape of the nothern Mid-West.

Honestly, I don't really care too much for novels. I find them bulky, time consuming to read and, from a creative standpoint, they often give the writer too much time to get sloppy. Instead, I've been reading poetry and short stories. In fact, I came to know Bonnie Jo Campbell's talent through Women and Other Animals -- her short story collection. Truthfully, I ordered Q Road because I've invited Bonnie Jo to Delta College as a visiting short fiction writer. Since Q Road is her most recent book, I thought I should have some familiarity with it. And, for me, it started out as a bathroom book. (I think people know what I mean.) But, as of last night, it's out of the bathroom. It's just too good to wait for. Campbell shows a craft with novel writing that one usually only sees in short fiction. This novel is tight! It's also compelling and the characters are fascinating. But, there's an authenticity that moves the novel along too -- a love and knowledge of farming and land is evident throughout the book. I'm only one hundred pages in, but I'm hooked. I've especially enjoyed how Campbell weaves the past into the present so effortlessly. Murder, Sex, Altruism, and Arable Land! It's in there. Get this book. Once you do, you'll see that it's just too good to only read in the smallest room in the house.

This first novel begins with the image of wooly-bear caterpillars crossing a rural road. If this doesn't seem auspicious, read on. I found Q Road to be a generous surprise and I don't say this easily. The depiction of the extinquishing of a goldfinch's life is beautiful and perfect and right,though I fought it all the way. The depictions of the people and their sudden realizations are equally stunning. What it is to believe in God, what it is to love another person, to gasp even for air: all these are given to us by this young author. This is a monster, a wondrous, beautiful book.

Campbell's book revolves around a quirky cast of characters in rural Michigan: foul-mouthed, child-bride Rachel, her husband George, and her best friend, asthmatic, 12-year-old David, to name a few. The story itself is not particularly remarkable, but Campbell's writing makes you want to not miss a moment.

Rifle-toting Rachel, abandoned by her distant, fur-trapping mother, marries the much older George Harland, a down-on-his-luck farmer, because she wants his land. She grows to love him in her own weird, tacit way. She also loves David, who becomes even more devoted to the mysterious Rachel after his near-death experience in a burning barn. There are some more neighborhood characters thrown into the mix, but you get to know these three the best. There wasn't so much in the way of a plot, it was really just a simple story, beautifully written, about loving the place you live and the people who live there, about getting lost, even in familiar territory, and finding your way back with the help of family and friends.

I think the "everything in the book happens over the course of one day" format can be about impossible to pull off, but Bonnie Jo Campbell nails it. Her cast of characters is excellent, and the way their lives intertwine is simply brilliant. She captures rural life perfectly, the foibles lurking in the hearts of its denizens, and the painful transition from farm life to subdivisions is shown in ways few writers have the chops to achieve. I loved her collection AMERICAN SALVAGE and was wary of reading anything else because the bar for how I viewed her work was so high, but I think I may like this novel even more. One of my favorite reads this year, for sure.

While I picked up this book because of the story's location, (outside Kalamazoo, Michigan where my daughter lives,) I was immediately drawn into this rural world peopled by an array of eclectic and sympathetic characters struggling with the onslaught of family farms being devoured by development. The plot revolves around one man's attempt to continue farming against the odds (and fate itself.) While the theme is both grand and timely, it is the people who live on Q Road that make this book one of the most absorbing books I have read in some time. Bonnie Jo Campbell has a gift for bringing a range of characters to life, and every one is both unique and believable and unlike any characters that have gone before. Parts are so beautifully written I had to read them several times, just to feel the goosebumps raise up on my skin from the sheer beauty and power of her words. When I finished, I wanted to begin again, for I was reluctant to leave these people and this world behind. I came away feeling that I had lived this story and cared deeply about the characters and most importantly about the land itself.