SOME GO HOME

Memories of a 1964 murder in Mississippi are forced back to the surface, reopening old wounds over race and class.

Lindsey’s ambitious debut novel—an admirable bid to compete with William Faulkner at his own game—concerns two forms of PTSD. Colleen, a white Iraq War vet, has returned home to the small town of Pitchlynn (“the poorest slice of the poorest state in the nation”) and is struggling toward normalcy. After a period of drinking and drugging laid her low, she’s started a tenuous new life with her husband, Derby, with whom she’s pregnant with twins. (Not that it keeps her from sneaking the occasional cigarette.) The other form of PTSD involves all of Pitchlynn: Derby’s father, Hare, is being retried for the murder of Gabe, a black man who stoked resentment among the white locals for owning land outright on a sharecropper farm. Derby has disowned Hare, but his half brother, Sonny, is sure Hare is innocent, though his efforts to defend dad’s honor end when his Cessna crashes, sending him to the ICU. Amid the anxiety over the retrial, another battle is brewing over the mansion once owned by the family that may have commissioned Hare to lynch Gabe; a massive magnolia tree on the property, and the abuses it receives over the course of the story, serves as a symbol for this complex interplay of blood and memory. Perhaps too complex: Some characters are underdrawn, as the ties among Hare’s family, friends, and enemies acquire ever thickening knots. (An issue in Faulkner’s fiction too, of course.) But the novel has some sturdy support beams in its central characters, especially Colleen, whose journey from soldier to almost–drug casualty to beauty queen to conflicted new mom is bracing at every turn.

A compassionate and complex debut, assuredly encompassing post–Iraq War fiction and old-fashioned Southern gothic.