Maud's Line by Margaret Verble (2015)

It seems that the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury has become fond of recognizing at least one relatively unknown book each year, although these are usually the runners-up rather than the winners, excepting 2010, when the obscure novel Tinkers won the big prize. This year Maud's Line is the dark-horse finalist, a choice that seemingly no one had anticipated. And I can see why.

Although the story is interesting and the background setting and milieu are extraordinarily well rendered, the writing seems amateurish and repetitive and full of questionable grammatical constructions. (More about this later.) The only reason I can think of for the Pulitzer jury to honor this book is that it encourages a promising writer who will surely go on to accomplish better things. I know for certain that other books under consideration were more accomplished.

Maud is a part-white Cherokee Indian living in Oklahoma in the late 1920s on the allotment given by the government to Trail of Tears survivors. Along with her often-absent father and her half-mad brother, she lives in a two room house without electricity or indoor plumbing, all the while longing for city life and modern conveniences such as she has read about in books. When a young man who is a teacher-turned-peddler for the summer comes along and they form a love connection, she believes she has found a path to her dreams. However, real life gets in the way, and tragic events, including murder, disrupt her hopeful plans.

According to the book jacket, author Margaret Verble is herself a member of the Cherokee Nation and the setting of the novel is her family's own allotment land, so the pictures she paints of the hardscrabble lives of largely impoverished Indians is undoubtedly accurate. I found it interesting that she differentiates between the attitudes of full blooded Cherokees and the attitudes of those with varying degrees of white blood, particularly as regards to sexual matters and retribution for wrongs done. She also admirably conveys the conflict between the comfort offered by an extended family and familiar customs versus the pull of the desire for something better in life.

Back to the shortcomings mentioned above. Consider this sentence: "She loitered some more, went into and out of Bard's Drugstore without buying anything, and wound toward the dance corner," and this one: "She stayed mostly on the planks in front of the stores, looked in windows for items that struck her fancy, and talked to girls she knew." Notice the identical construction? Within two pages, four more sentences occur with exactly this pattern. When Verble is not using simple subject-verb sentences, this is the construction she favors. The result is that the entire book reads as if it were written for a middle-school audience.

Here's something else I also found off-putting. The novel is written using a third person limited point of view. Usually when an author using this point of view creates characters who have a distinctive vernacular, he or she will write the narration in formal English and limit the language eccentricities of the particular region and social class to the dialogue. That was not the case here. The narration also uses the unique words and expressions of the characters portrayed. Maybe this was purposeful, an effort to convey that the narrator (author) herself comes from the same background. I don't know, but it did seem strange.

This is Verble's first novel, and I would classify it as a laudable effort. Its writing is just not what I would expect to read from a Pulitzer finalist.