Is this really the first book I finished this year?

On Jewel by Bret Lott – Picked this one up as part of my Regional Reading plan. I had heard of it before as an Oprah Pick, but wrote it off, I think because I had it linked in my mind with the story about the girl who gives birth in the Walmart parking lot that I couldn’t finish (Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts). Lotts' writing is definitely better than Letts'. He gives his characters enough of a southern drawl to locate them, without letting the dialect take over.

Half of Jewel takes place not too far from where we live in Mississippi, and the other half takes place in LA, which seared itself into my memory when we lived in Port Hueneme. But Jewel doesn’t quite fit with my conception of Southern Lit. It’s not sassy chick lit, but because it focuses on the raising of a girl with Downs’ Syndrome, it’s too much of an issue oriented book to fit my concept of a true Southern Lit book – it’s not about a family struggling in the south, but escaping it.

So while I enjoyed the book, I didn’t love it. I found it hard to believe that this backwoods family could move so easily to California, find a house and jobs, get their child into the too perfect Foundation for Exceptional Children, and make it. That the daughter, Brenda Kay, who was to be put in an institution until she died at 2, lives to her 40’s and learns seems a little more believable, and Jewel’s dedication to helping her rise above those expectations is admirable. That Jewel’s five other children grow up and don’t resent her devotion to her sixth child also seemed a stretch.

But perhaps the hardest to believe, and perhaps what I appreciated most, was that the marriage between Jewel and Leston survives Jewel’s single minded pursuit of what is best for her daughter. She sacrifices her relationships with her other children and with her husband to force the family out to California. She watches Leston give in to humiliation after humiliation without ever seeming to give him a lift. And when he finally asserts his will that they return to Mississippi, she goes only because “Wife” is her identity, as she realizes one day, looking at the name tags other people are wearing and her simple clothing. She balks and tries to undermine his joy at their return to MS, even prays that he "will have died enough" to see what is best for their family.

"I never knew when or how I fell asleep, only knew that when I awoke each morning I sat straight up in bed, my nightgown soaked with sweat, and shot my eyes round the room in an effort to remember where I was, and who this man in bed next to me was, and that word Wife still circled me, swirled round me like a fearless ghost in the pale, wet light of dawn on a bayou, outside the open window behind me the lonesome, measured drone of a woodpecker in a cypress, this next day in Mississippi already begun."

Finally, when she begins to accept the way things are after a few months, Leston himself admits he wants to return to California, so they move back, not far from where their other grown children are living. (It is telling that the author grew up in California, although his parents were from Mississippi; in the book it is a place of mosquitoes, cottonmouths, and racists.)

Their marriage survives these blows, but in the end Jewel seems to suffer more about the decision to put Brenda Kay into a home than she mourned Leston’s death. I found myself rooting for Leston who finds himself pushed and pulled by his wife and surroundings but never breaks down or runs off or even seems to waiver in his love for his domineering wife.

Even though she was a southern Baptist, Jewel surely would've been happy to see these sisters with Downs', via Pentimento from Laodicea.