Where the Crawdads Sing
A frenzy of buzz has followed Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing since its publication last year (2018). When Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club highlighted the novel, its popularity sky-rocketed; and now, with a movie in the works (produced by Witherspoon), the reading world has gone full-on gaga over Owen’s debut novel. After months on my to-read list, Where the Crawdads Sing was among my summer reading. I have to say that I had mixed feelings; while I read the novel quickly and relished some of Owen’s prose (particularly describing the natural world), some elements felt flat or unfinished. This book is part coming of age novel, part crime drama. It weaves two sets of story lines, one beginning in 1952, the other in 1969. The Carolina marsh is setting for both stories, and the characters are the same. Thus, Owens’s reader jumps back and forth in the chronology of her protagonist, Kya Clark’s, life.
In 1952, Kya is a small child, the youngest daughter of a large family living in poor in the isolated Caroline marsh. She is a young woman, independent and self-made, but withdrawn and perhaps even slightly feral in 1969. At some point in the narrative, adult Kya (a la 1970) consumes the story and flashbacks become more recent (to 1968/69); child Kya fades into the marsh that raised her. This is a story about abandonment, domestic abuse and neglect, the long-handed impacts of trauma, the power of literacy and friendship, and the wild, beautiful spaces of the Caroline marshy coast. It is also, however, a crime novel. It opens with a dead body in the marsh and includes a sleuthing sheriff and his deputy, as well as a murder trial. So, in some ways, this novel is the perfect novel: there is eloquent nature writing, heartbreaking family drama, coming of age tropes, and murder mystery, with a bit of #MeToo thrown in. I can certainly see why Where the Crawdads Sing has been on the NYT bestseller list for a year; it is both visceral and reverent, delicate and brutal.
I want to ignore the dead body in the marsh with which Owens opens the novel (in part because I am not a huge murder mystery fan), and focus on Kya. Kya’s coming of age story is one of heart-rending abandonment. First her Ma, then her brother, Jodie (her only companion), and finally her Pa walk out of her life, leaving young Kya abandoned and alone in the marsh around age eight. The only thing never to leave is the natural world in which she lives and the creatures with whom she shares that space; she thrives in the wild around her. It absorbs her and inspires her more than any human connection; she lives as much a part of the natural world of the Carolina marshy coast, as the great blue herons or the gulls. She becomes Marsh Girl.
Her only human contact, her only support outside the natural world, is to Jumpin, an African American man who runs a bait shop on a wharf amidst the marsh and lives in Colored Town, the segregated village where all the “colored” folks live: a barrier between the Marsh and Barkley Cove. After years of surviving in the marsh on her own (and with the dignified assistance of Jumpin and his wife, Mabel), Kya connects with Tate, a solitary boy equally enamored with the natural world. Tate was once friends Kya’s brother, Jodie, and he reaches out to Kya in a language she can appreciate: one of feathers and found natural objects. Tate bequeaths Kya with two of her life’s most precious gifts: literacy and love. Yet, Tate’s life path leads him out of the marsh for a time and Kya is left, once again, alone with the wild. It is in isolation that the predator pins down its prey; Owens’s story returns again and again to the parallels between humans and the rest of the natural world. Once alone, Kya becomes the prey of a sexual predator, and this fact propels the novel’s second storyline: the murder mystery of Chase Andrews’s dead body found in the opening pages.
Kya’s mother tongue is that of the natural world, as I believe Owens suggests is true for us all when we get down to the genetic material at our core. Young Kya communicates with feathers and seashells—found objects from her marsh home—later watercolor painting, natural sketches, and the nature poetry of Amanda Hamilton embody maturing (literate) Kya’s expression. After learning to read, Kya calls forth Hamilton’s poetry throughout the novel as it reflects her inner thoughts, her outer chaos. I found these poetic intrusions appealing and admired the added layer they provided Owen’s craft. Similarly, as a watercolorist myself, I appreciated the element that visual art plays in the novel (first with Kya’s Ma and later with Kya herself). Kya makes a life for herself, once she pursues the gift of literacy, by sharing her expressions of her natural surroundings with the greater world.
Returning to the dead body that opens the book, I would be remiss in failing to discuss the murder mystery (culminating with prison time and a criminal trial) also at work in this novel. This is not the only novel of late that challenges readers to contemplate the notion of moral murder (see my Bookphonic review of Whisper Network for another—albeit wildly different—example). By the novel’s close, Owens has un-spun elements of Kya’s life and (perhaps?) shocked her readers by revealing secrets they may not have foreseen. She does so quickly, however, and I felt she left many of my questions unanswered. Perhaps this was by design, and she plans to revisit Kya’s story in a sequel, or perhaps she simply ran out of narrative steam. Regardless, I find the murder mystery component of Where the Crawdads Sing all the more interesting in light of Owens’ personal experience with something that some frame as moral murder. Her ex-husband and stepson are suspects in the 1995 murder of an unidentified poacher in Zambia (caught on film by an ABC film crew while filming “Deadly Game” a documentary about poaching and the Owens in Zambia). The Owens lived and worked as biologists in Africa for over two decades (they were expelled from Botswana and ended up settling in northern Zambia amidst a heavily-poached elephant population). So much of Owens’ project re-inserts human social experience into the natural laws of the wild in which, “judgement had no place [. . . e]vil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light” (Owens 142-143). I have always found memoir as fiction fascinating, and reading Chase Andrews as poacher, a captivating layer in Where the Crawdads Sing.
While I believe there are certainly narrative flaws in Owens’ debut novel, it is undoubtedly a contemporary classic (having sold more than a million copies in its first year of publication). It is a fast-paced, at times beautifully worded, novel that all readers should sit with for a while. Owens’ insistence that humans are just as much a part of the natural order as fireflies provokes considerable reflection. What’s more, I find that Kya’s resilience, dignity, and survival will stay with you long after you’ve finished the final chapter.
A Few Great Passages:
“Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws—not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simply math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks” (8).
“In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We will store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder” (237-238).
“Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core” (363).
“Tate’s devotion eventually convinced her that human love is more than the bizarre mating competitions of the marsh creatures, but life also taught her that ancient genes for survival still persist in some undesirable forms among the twists and turns of man’s genetic code” (363).
“For Kya, it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides. She was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother” (363).
Bibliography & Further Reading:
Gaynor, Jessie. “Murder? Poachers? What the hell is going on with Where the Crawdad’s Sing” Literary Hub: July 30, 2019.
Goldberg, Jeffrey. “The Hunted” The New Yorker: March 29, 2010.
Miller, Laura. “The Dark History Behind the Year’s Bestselling Debut Novel” Slate: July 30, 2019.
Owens, Delia. Where the Crawdad Sing. G. P. Putnam’s Sons: New York, 2018.
