All too often, books do not live up to their critical hype, but this one does. Winner already of the National Book Award, it is predicted by many also to win this year's Pulitzer Prize. I have only good things to say about it.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is by turns lyrical and dreamlike or harsh and brutal, in language that is immediate and poetic. It is narrated by the voices of a 13-year-old black boy and his mother, with the additional voice of a ghost toward the end. All but deserted by his drug-addicted mother, the boy Jojo lives with this maternal grandparents and serves as the emotional parent of his little sister. When his white father is scheduled for release from prison, his mother takes the children on a surreal road-trip to pick him up. When they finally reach their destination, the ghost of a long-dead boy joins them for the trip home, for reasons of his own.
"Ghost," you may say. "Is this a horror story?" But no, it's not that at all, in the usual sense. Yet it is indeed horrible that the ghosts of the past linger and are so hard to overcome. In the words of one character, this ghost is "pulling all the weight of history behind him." Reading this, I was always reminded of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Like that one, this has a mythical quality with meaning beyond the every-day, and, of course, this features a similar dreamlike journey. Toni Morrison's Beloved also came to mind.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is not just a good book or an interesting book; it is an important book. It deserves all the awards it can get.
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