Q Road : A Novel

Campbell's Once Upon a River was one of my favorite books of 2011. When I heard her read from it, she mentioned that the main character, Margo Crane, played a small role in one of her earlier books, Q Road. Q Road was written in 2002, but I'm hoping that fans of Once Upon a River and American Salvage will seek out this earlier book.

Q Road takes place over the course of one day, October 9, 1999, with some flashbacks to round out the story. Rachel Crane, Margo's daughter, has recently married George Harland, who is many years her senior. George is trying to make a living on his family farm in rural Michigan, while farmland around him is being turned into subdivisions with prefab houses. But George still finds it in his heart to allow Sally, an alcoholic whose husband recently left her, and her son David to live rent-free on his land. Their stories intertwine with the stories of Steve and Nicole, Elaine, April May, and other residents of Q Road. Campbell has no problem keeping the threads of the story pulled taut in a way that propels the reader forward. The result is a portrait of life in rural Michigan and a meditation on the difficulties of being your own person while sharing your life with others.

This book placed Bonnie Jo Campbell solidly on my list of favorite authors, and I still haven't read American Salvage yet. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I recently found myself with the opportunity to interview revered author Bonnie Jo Campbell for the CCLaP Podcast; and so before doing so, I thought it would be beneficial to read her two most popular books besides the one I've already read (2011's Once Upon a River, that is, considered by many to be a frontrunner for this year's Pulitzer). And indeed, it turned out to be quite important that I read her 1999 breakout novel Q Road before talking with her, because it turns out to be a clever sort of prequel/sequel to the Once Upon a River title we'll mainly be discussing; set on the cusp of the new millennium, it tells the story of the "last hurrah" of sorts for a rural farmland area just outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan before finally succumbing to the capitalist steamroller of exurban subdivisions, chain restaurants and pristine golf courses, an Altmanesque interrelated ensemble character piece in which one of the characters (teenage tomboy and child bride Rachel Crane) just happens to be the daughter of the main character of Once Upon a River (the even more hardcore tomboy Margo Crane), only with the newer novel set in the older 1970s and examining Margo's own teenage years as a tight-lipped, sharpshooting pregnant runaway.

And in fact you can look at all three of these books in much the same light (including the slim 2009 story collection American Salvage, the third title in this list); they are all episodic in nature, take a sympathetic and nonjudgemental look at the kinds of characters we would traditionally call dumb white trash, yet can frequently reach a level of poetic harshness and violence akin to a Sam Shepard play, stories that don't excuse the behavior of the meth addicts, racists and uneducated hillbillies that populate her universe but that don't dismiss such characters either, an attitude that I'm sure at least partly stems from Campbell's own background as a willful tomboy in this exact kind of rural Michigan environment (but more on that in the finished podcast episode, coming next week). Powerful and unflinching, yet beautiful and easily readable, it's no surprise after reading these three books that Campbell would have the kind of intensely passionate fanbase that she does, as well as racking up such academic tentpoles as a Pushcart Prize, Eudora Welty Prize, National Book Award nomination and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination; and I wholeheartedly recommend them all to a general audience.

Out of 10:
Q Road: 9.4
American Salvage: 9.0 ( )

I was eager to read this novel, because I really loved Bonnie Jo Campbell's most recent collection of short stories, American Salvage. Q Road was a delight, with compelling and interesting main characters confronting personal and social issues in an old farming community that is being developed as farmers sell off their land. Campbell interleaves the story of one particular day (when something dramatic happens) with the backstories of these characters and insight into a host of minor characters, as well as beautiful portraits of the woods and the land and people's connections to the land and the animals on it. Although I loved this novel, and it grew on me as I read it, in places I could still see the author at work, something which was completely absent in American Salvage where all the memorable characters seemed completely themselves.

An unlikely mix of people live along this road, from farmers struggling to retain ownership of their land to a window salesman in a new prefab house. Their stories are told against the backdrop of one eventful day which culminates in the burning of the oldest barn in the township. ( )