Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

Spelling Mississippi

by Marnie Woodrow

In this bourbon-soaked barnburner of a tale, the Mississippi River becomes the catalyst for one woman’s midnight swim, and another’s plunge into obsession. Spelling Mississippi is short-story writer Marnie Woodrow’s first novel, and she’s chosen a metaphorically rich symbol to animate it, allowing the famous river to elicit stories and then link their tellers. The setting is a New Orleans stocked with star-crossed lovers, barflies, thwarted dreams, and mother-daughter showdowns.

The novel opens with the unsuspecting Cleo Savoy, a young tourist from Toronto, witnessing a southern belle in evening dress hurl herself headlong into the fast-flowing Mississippi. Disoriented by what she has seen, and suspecting suicide, or something more sordid, Cleo flees into the New Orleans night. This sighting becomes the plot’s impetus, with Cleo determined to uncover the secrets of the mystery woman’s background and motives. When the two women finally meet, their personal journeys connect and lead them into a revelatory love affair.

Cleo is a keeper of secrets, from her family, from herself, and consequently, from the reader: “Silence begets silence, she thinks with satisfaction; mystery begets more mystery.” Cleo is punishing her father for having withheld information regarding her absent mother, but, as she observes, when questions go unanswered for long enough, they tend to breed more questions – and enough unanswered questions keep a reader blithely turning pages.

Woodrow’s narrative strategy switches to a careful parsing out of information, with the novel’s focus shifting skilfully from Cleo to the mystery woman, Madeline, and back into each woman’s past. In this way, Woodrow introduces and fleshes out her main characters, without diffusing the story’s initial intrigue. Unfortunately, the more peripheral players are not always as complex. While Madeline herself is compelling – she’s gutsy, whipsmart, and quick with a comeback – the man in her life, Johnny V, is less nuanced, making elements of their relationship feel stilted and implausible. The same holds true for Cleo’s misunderstood stepmother, who, while more than just a “type,” is hardly a unique personality.

Spelling Mississippi’s structure also allows the third-person narrative to play with notions of fate and inevitability in the characters’ lives, themes that fit nicely with New Orleans’ reputation for romance and magic. But these themes occasionally feel like awkward authorial intrusions. This awkwardness is usually a result of a switch from the third-person intimate – in which the narrative voice mirrors the perceptions and memories of a single character – to a more omniscient stance. For example, after recapping a series of recent events in three of the characters’ lives, Woodrow writes: “A trio of weepers, each one drowning in a flood of self-pity. Somebody in this trio should do something. By morning, each somebody will.”

This tendency towards the melodramatic is mirrored in the strangely elevated diction of some descriptive passages: “Her cognitive powers have been greatly diminished by lack of food and the discombobulated state that comes of hours spent writing poetry.…” There are times when the prose can bear this baroque quality – the setting is, after all, baroque – but there are too many instances of it in the novel.

The love scenes also suffer from this overwriting, often swooning into dimestore romance territory, as in the denouement, where Cleo and Madeline “seemed able to read each other’s desires, making love with the fury of adults who suddenly possessed the trusting instincts of children.” This is a shame, since the novel is, at its root, about people overcoming their tangled, traumatic histories to authentically find one another.

Cleo spends a good part of her time in New Orleans observing the local colour, downing beers, writing poetry, and trying to avoid confronting her past. When Cleo’s demons persist, “she does what she has always done in times of duress: she turns her pain into a story.” There are times when the novel itself feels like a well-intentioned, charismatic, New Orleans drunk, intent on turning her pain into a story. Spelling Mississippi is by turns cliché-ridden, overly sentimental, charmingly uninhibited, and surprisingly wise, with an ambitious vision that blurs around the edges, the kind of drunk you end up listening to despite yourself.

 

Reviewer: Heather Birrell

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32.95

Page Count: 390 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97431-7

Released: Mar.

Issue Date: 2002-2

Categories: Fiction: Novels