Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward · 2017
A Black family road trip through Mississippi, haunted by ghosts. Ward's prose is incantatory, the violence both historical and present, and the novel's use of ghost narrative to confront what American life does to Black families is unlike anything else published in the decade. Her second National Book Award.
The case against
Ward strains for Faulkner and Morrison, and the strain shows: every object trembles with significance, every chapter sings in the same high register. Richie's ghost narration explains what the living chapters already dramatized, Leonie is condemned by the framing before she can plead, and the closing tree of spirits arrives with its meaning underlined twice.
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