The reader is tricked into an almost impossible belief: that Katrina cannot be real, cannot be coming, cannot be what we know it was. The most significant accomplishment of Salvage the Bones is the extent to which it makes the storm, before it hits, seem insignificant. Narrative structure makes disaster seem right, or at least intended. The problem with typical foreshadowing is that it positions tragedy, even tragedy on the scale of Katrina, as a natural, and therefore acceptable, consequence of the events that preceded it. Perhaps this sounds like criticism, but it is exactly the opposite. The richness of the characters Ward offers makes the storm feel like a petty, mechanistic resolution for lives that are too real and too problematic to submit to easy completion.

Her story is too good, too compelling and too complex to be resolved by a simple tragedy. Her characters are too full to be set-pieces, victims in waiting. Hers is not a world built to be ravaged by a hurricane. Jesmyn Ward’s copious foreshadowing has little impact on the reader. We roll our eyes, like they do … even though we ought to know better. The reader becomes so entangled in the lives of Esch and her brothers that we regard her father and his ongoing warnings as distractions. His monomaniacal puttering pales against the more pressing concerns of the other characters. But in this activity he seems more irrelevant than revealing. He speaks only to warn of the storm that’s coming, and he acts only in fear of it. Esch’s father, though otherwise absent from the role of care-taker and protector, occupies himself throughout the book with preparations for the coming storm, enlisting whichever of his children he happens to lay eyes on to the same cause. Salvage the Bones does not want for foreshadowing, to be sure.

There is a tendency in ‘disaster fiction’ to give the bulk of the narrative over to foreshadowing: to point every action toward the event to render a setting only that it might be struck down to cast every character as either a villain or a victim. Salvage the Bones is set in the days before Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the poor, largely black, rural town of Bois Sauvage.

In any other novel, just one of their stories would spill over the sides of the page. Randall and Junior, Esch’s oldest and youngest brothers, are more distant, but no less alive, and no less real. While hiding her pregnancy from him, Esch helps Skeetah try to save the pups. Skeetah keeps a fighting pit-bull named China, who is the new mother of a weak litter which quickly begins to die off.

Jesmyn ward salvage the bones review