SALT

A first novel by poet Zuber is a wistful, postdiluvian tale of southern rural longing without the rich, creeping detail that might make it worth the while of readers of Faulkner and McCullers.

In true romance fashion, Roland Bayley, whose mother was a longtime, well-loved inhabitant of Faith, North Carolina, returns with his young family in 1932 to discover mysterious, undelivered love letters to her written decades before. Who was Anna Stockton Bayley, a woman who abandoned her dreams of learning about the wider world when impregnated, in 1897, by the brutish, twice-widowed farmer John Bayley, and settled into farm life in Faith a half century before to raise Roland and his passel of siblings? The backstory that ensues feels listless because obligatory, as well as tedious in its familiarity: a poor, young, strong-working, rosy-faced girl is hired as a servant by the wealthy Alba family in a neighboring town, where Anna learns about music and culture and is even proposed to by the son of her employer. Eventually, she’s spotted by a stern, hard-drinking, ambitious widower who resolves to change his life if Anna will marry him—and even if she says no (“There're things I want to know about”), she has to because she's carrying his baby. And so it goes through the years: the babies who come one after the other, the accretion by John of land or property or wealth, and the gradual wearying away of love and need between the two. Even Anna's one moment of rebellion (a three-day affair in middle-age with a man she meets on a train) arrives too late to summon any needed vitality into this plainspoken, salt-of -the-earth, no-surprises narrative. A novel’s worth is in the details, Flaubert might say, and Zuber's

curiously dispassionate southern family history is as generic as they come.