12/01/01

With it generous length, and intricately woven story, Mother of Pearl is an engrossing novel that spans the coming of age genre and the social history, becoming a wonderfully delightful read, as well as an interesting portrait of 1950's Mississippi.

Valuable Korner is in the midst of a summer of sexual awakening, guided by the advice of the almost mythical Joody Two Sun, a mysterious figure with magical sticks in her hair who lives down among the rocks at the river's edge. Though both women are racially separated by society, Joody guides Valuable through the turbulence of her sexual relationship with Jackson (her unwitting half brother), her promiscuous and scandalous mother, and her intolerant controlling aunts. Valuable's story, however, is not the only thread in this tightly woven work, a novel which also includes down to earth Even Grade (an excellent example of character naming) who falls in love the outcast and captivating Joody, and Canaan, the philosopher, who takes up with the wise and motherly Grace. There's also the moorless Joleb, who believes himself responsible for his mother's stroke and his brother's death. After Valuable becomes pregnant, each of their worlds is impacted gravely, leading to a hopeful, yet bitterweet, ending. Haynes skillfuly interweaves all of these threads, overlapping them with great skill.

The novel also centers on secrets--both those kept from us and those we keep from ourselves. Valuable struggles to find the identity of her father and, in doing so, discovers a terrible family secret. Her aunts, Bea and Neva, struggle to keep Valuable and Jackson's sibling relationship a secret, as well as her pregnancy, which ultimately leads to horrible consequences. Denial of the self is also an important issue, as Joody urges Valuable to become a "six-sided woman"--a fully realized woman in contrast to the incomplete women she is surrounded by--her grandmother, her mother, her aunts. Joody tells Valuable:

"A woman gotta get back to Deep Mother to understand these things; to understand the proper way to be a woman. Deep Mother is six-sided. Like this. . . Feeling. Seeing. Knowing. Smelling. Tasting. Hearing. Anything less, ain't Woman" (62).

Mother of Pearl is also an examination of race relations in the 1950's deep south. As the characters become more and more intertwined, the social distance between them becomes an increasingly contentious issue. Characters like Joody, because of her mixed race and startling behavior, is ostracized yet looked to for guidance. Tension erupts when Joleb acknowledges Grace as his "true" mother. Valuable's discovery of her grandfather's shameful past rends a hole in her relationship with Joody and the others. The novel, however, that begins with a scene of racial violence, ends with a serene note of unity and contentment.

Haynes, with her simple and no-nonsense prose, juggles the multitude of characters and great length of the novel quite skillfully, layering story upon story, plumbing several layers of meaning. The novels's length gives it an almost epic feel, creating more to this novel than can possibly be explained. Echoing strains of guilt, sin, hope, and renewal, Haynes' work has often been described as reminiscent of Faulkner, and compared to Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. On its own, however, Mother of Pearl moves far beyond a simple coming of age story and into something infinitely deeper.