Martha Southgate

The Taste of Salt is one of those novels that requires time to sit and stew on what was just read. The power of the novel only comes after the reader has had time to reflect. While it could be construed as depressingly realistic in its portrayal of family and addiction, there is an underlying beauty that rises to the top after time.

The name of the novel itself is a subtle hint to the pleasures and pain that await the reader. Salt itself can be delicious and necessary for life. At the same show more time, too much of it can be deadly. Salt, in this instance, can symbolize anything that is simultaneously good and bad for you - family, love, booze. In this instance, Josie's own love of the ocean is both a hindrance and a boon for her. She uses her position to keep her distance from her estranged father and her beloved brother as he spirals downward. Yet, she also uses it to maintain a tremendous chip on her shoulder about her position as a lone black female in a white male-dominated field. This chip also impacts her relationship with her family and with her husband and prevents the reader from completely sympathizing with her.

No one in The Taste of Salt is completely without guilt at the eventual outcomes of certain plot points. Therein lies the strength of the novel, as it forces the reader to question his or her own relationships and biases that one carries and that impact those relationships. Ms. Southgate also shines a light on the messiness of family and how interdependent family members are on one another. One simple hurt can impact familial relationships forever. It is a stark reminder that family is all that one has in the end and that no matter how far one runs away from them, that link always exists.

The Taste of Salt is a deceptively simple novel that stays with the reader for a long time after finishing it. None of the characters are truly likable, but all readers can relate to Josie's struggle to find her place in her field and balance her need for her family with her disgust for what has occurred. Ms. Southgate captures brilliantly the lack of absolutes that surrounds familial love and guilt. The Taste of Salt is a must-read for those who are interested in a thoughtful novel about family and love.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to GLiBA for my copy! show less

Josie Henderson, 36, is the only black senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. Her husband Danny, who is white, is also a scientist there. Her marriage isn’t satisfying to her; she feels hungers that she can’t express with Danny, who is a quiet loving man who just wants Josie and a family. Josie loves Danny, but wants something different; she wants more sexual diversity and she doesn’t want kids. She wants more excitement and more zip in her life. show more And in fact, her marital situation is a reflection of the existential dichotomy that is constantly ripping apart Josie’s psyche. She is a black person in a mostly white milieu, and she is ambivalent about it. Part of her wants to remain totally separate from her background, which included coming from a blighted city and a family destroyed by alcoholism. In fact, it is partly the fear of being pulled into that spiral of failure that has driven her. But another part of her wants to celebrate her brownness and share her ethnic predilections with someone who “gets” them.

Much of Josie’s story concerns the two men of her nuclear family: her father, whose alcoholism broke the family apart, and her brother “Tick” who now is addicted to alcohol and drugs. Josie avoids both of them; she is full of contempt, shame, and fear that associating them will somehow contaminate her. She especially resents her father for giving up his family to the siren call of alcohol. And yet, when another black scientist, Ben, finally comes to Woods Hole, Josie is willing to throw away her own family to experience some of what she herself has been craving.

Discussion: Given Josie’s own weaknesses, I found her lack of sympathy for her father and brother rather astonishing. She is totally focused on their failures, and exhibits a total lack of self-awareness about her own. (This in spite of Josie’s contention that “I’m a scientist. I like to get to the bottom of things.”) Certainly she could be angry and sad and want to distance herself alongside of some understanding for them. And indeed, Josie seems flummoxed that her mother still feels something for her father, as if relationships have to be all good all the time or love can’t or shouldn’t persist. I also thought it unrealistic that given her scientific bent and understanding of the limitations of twelve-step programs that she would not have helped her brother get into some of the programs that use opioid receptor antagonists for management of alcohol and drug addiction.

At the end of the book, I didn’t see that Josie had any more insight than she had at the beginning. Some characters were badly hurt, some were struggling mightily with their own demons, but Josie was just ready to go on blithely, still convinced that no one else’s problems or pain were more important than her own inner conflicts.

Evaluation: I didn’t like Josie, the main character, and wasn’t convinced of her verisimilitude as an accomplished black scientist. I also thought that Southgate attributed some differences to race that weren’t necessarily justified; there are a lot of variables that can cause couples not to share the same outlook or taste in music, for example, from age to social class to the community in which you grew up. Southgate didn’t convince me (in this narrative, at any rate) that Ben’s appeal over Danny was due to anything more than external color, and that seemed rather ironically short-sighted of Josie after spending her life trying to prove that external color is superfluous. And finally, I didn’t feel anything actually happened in the book to change the protagonist. It left me feeling rather dissatisfied. show less

This book fell into my hands this morning, the author previously unknown to me. I guessed that I would like her writing because another favorite author of mine (Dan Chaon) wrote one of the blurbs. What I didn't guess was that once I started reading, I wouldn't be able to put it down until I finished, sobbing by the end. Such effortless seeming prose which I know is in fact far from being so. I was able to relate so well, sometimes too well to all of the characters. What is it about human show more nature that makes us want to self destruct? Can't wait to get my hands on more of this author's work! show less

My family's always maintained that you are either a lake person or an ocean person (assuming you like the water, I guess). I've always been a lake person. I don't particularly like the taste of salt water and I loathe sand. I grew up paddling around in fresh water and yet when I learned to scuba dive last year, it was like coming home for me. Like Josie Henderson in Martha Southgate's The Taste of Salt, I was not raised in close proximity with the ocean but I have always felt the pull of show more water. And although it took me a long time to come to feel the salt water running through my veins, I ache to get back under the ocean again.

Josie Henderson is a well respected marine biologist working at the acclaimed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. As if being a woman wasn't rare enough in her field, she is also a black woman and she delights in her uniqueness. Her husband Daniel is an icthyologist at Woods Hole. He is a gentle, milquetoast sort of man, native to the area, and interested in starting a family that Josie is fairly certain she doesn't want. He is also white , making Josie suspect that he cannot possibly understand her or where she has come from.

Where she has come from is a suburb of Cleveland, far from the ocean, where her father spent her entire childhood sunk deep into a bottle and her mother worked as a nurse to support Josie and her charismatic younger brother Tick after she kicked their father out. Josie doesn't like to share her dysfunctional family situation with anyone and would prefer to keep them in her past but when her mother asks her to come home and collect Tick from his latest stint at rehab, she can't say no. And when Tick subsequently shows up at her door with no where else to go, she takes him in, despite knowing that he is still in the clutches of his own alcoholism.

Although she has worked hard to distance herself from her family, Josie is clearly damaged by her childhood as the daughter of an alcoholic. She sabotages her relationships and never lets anyone too close to her. Her best and favorite coping strategy is avoidance. While Josie is the catalyst around whom the story unfolds, each of her family members also narrates portions of their own tale as well, showing the all around damage that an addiction inflicts on not only the alcoholic but on the alcoholic's loved ones as well.

The novel takes place in the present but also has flashbacks to Josie's parents' meeting and courtship, her father's migration from the South to the North, echoing many working class blacks of the time, and his gradual descent into alcoholism when Josie and Tick were small. Southgate also confronts the continued realities of racism in this day and age through both the successful Josie's eyes and through down and out Tick's eyes.

The multiple narrators help to move the story along and to fill in the blanks where other characters couldn't possibly know the truth but the characters' individual voices aren't quite different enough to make them easy for the reader to immediately differentiate between. Josie as a character isn't terribly likable. She is so self-centered and selfish that it is hard to sympathize with her character. She treads all over her nice and unassuming husband without explaining her feelings to him at all and giving him a chance to be who she needs him to be. Brother Tick is a fairly stereotypical addict and there's never any doubt where his storyline is going. But despite these flaws, there's a grace and a beauty in the ending that ultimately helps to make the book more hopeful than dysfunctional. An interesting perspective on the casualties of addiction, the roles of family, and of race, this would provide a lot of fodder for book clubs to dicuss. show less