This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1973.
Laurel Hand comes home from Chicago to Mississippi when her father needs to have eye surgery. He has a torn retina and after the surgery he will be confined to a hospital bed for several weeks and he has to keep absolutely still or his eye may not heal.
Laurel's mother Becky died years ago and her father remarried to a woman Laurel's age, Fay. Fay is shallow and selfish and she regards Laurel and Laurel's dead mother Becky as her rivals.
After the surgery, while Laurel's father, Judge McKelva, lays motionless in bed, Fay complains that she is missing the Carnival. Always, her first thought is for herself.
Judge McKelva starts to decline. He becomes remote and somewhat unresponsive to his wife and daughter. Laurel sits at his bedside reading to herself as he doesn't seem to want her to read to him. Laurel thinks that "her father seemed to be paying some unbargained-for price for his recovery...his face looked tireder every morning."
One night, Fay gets fed up with the Judge's unresponsiveness and tries to give him a good shaking, as she says later, "I tried to make him quit his old-man foolishness. I was going to make him live if I had to drag him!" He dies shortly thereafter. Laurel feels that Fay caused his death by shaking him like she did.
The Judge's body is taken to his house and all the friends and relatives stop by to pay their respects. Fay's family also shows up, coming all the way from Texas. In the novel, they are supposed to be lower class people than Laurel's people. They just seemed like ordinary folks to me, no worse or better than most.
After the funeral, Fay decides to go home for a visit for a week leaving Laurel alone in the house, the house that Judge McKelva left to his wife and not to his daughter.
Laurel goes through her father's desk and her mother's papers. She thinks about their marriage and about her mother's death. When she was dying, Becky felt, probably unreasonably, that her family was betraying her. The last thing she said to Laurel was, "You could have saved your mother's life. But you stood by and wouldn't intervene. I despair for you." Laurel also recalls her own brief marriage to a man who died in WW II.
Laurel had planned to be gone by the time Fay came back from her trip but Fay comes home early, perhaps because she want to confront Laurel, to establish her dominance and ownership over the house that Laurel grew up in. They have an argument that almost turns violent. But Laurel realizes that Fay will never understand her because Fay is "without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person...[Fay] could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him."
I just plain didn't like this book at all. The wake part of the book lasts so long that it was almost like being there, and not in a good way. A lot of the motivations of the characters are left unspoken, disguised in language that just sorts of hints at what is going on. I found this book tedious and overly subtle.
Review from Kirkus Reviews.
New Words
Feist: a small, nervous, belligerent mongrel dog. "She [Fay] had round, country-blue eyes and a little feist jaw."
Packthread: a strong three-ply twine used to sew or tie packages. "Laurel was halted. A thousand packthreads seemed to cross and crisscross her skin, binding her there."
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