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  • Neighbors in Need
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The Quickening. Michelle Hoover. Other Press. http://www.otherpress.com. 224 pages; paper, $14.95.

In his essay collection about farming, The Land Was Everything (2000), Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Farmers, like their kindred in town, as a rule regard all of their own species whom they do not know, but who enter their domain, as enemies.... His industrious neighbor (who is a mirror image of himself) he watches carefully...you chafe at, but under no circumstances do you strike, your neighbor."

Over and over again, the characters in Michelle Hoover's debut novel, The Quickening, break this first and crucial tenant of family farming to devastating effect. On the first page, we are introduced to Enidina Current—one of the book's two narrators—and the basic conflict of the novel: "The Morrow family, they were a worry to ours from day one. And once you know what they took from us, you might just understand the kind of people you come from."

The Morrows are the neighboring farm family to the Currents, and the novel is alternately narrated by Enidina and Mary Morrow as their lives spin together to become irrevocably entangled. The novel begins in 1950. Enidina is writing a letter to a grandson she's never met, attempting to tell the story of their family. She flashes back to 1913, when she and her husband Frank settle a small farm that abuts land owned by the Morrows. Each chapter alternates between Enidina's epistolary voice and Mary's version of the events. In brief, lyric chapters, the novel winds through the decades, telling the story of the Depression-era family farm and its struggle to survive the strains of subsidies, bankruptcy, and a fraught relationship between neighbors, but its focus is the unspoken yearnings and fears of the two women as they cope with their separate histories and worry about the futures of their families, futures that slowly merge over time.

The slow burn between the families, punctuated by violent and enervating eruptions, is captivatingly wrought by Hoover, who allows the relationship between Enidina and Mary to be complicated, tentative, and alternately warm and cold. Enidina is the daughter of a farmer and has never known or wanted another life, while Mary comes from town. Schooled in etiquette, she is not equipped for the dirt and drudgery of farm life. What Mary wants more than anything is companionship, someone who will understand her, while Enidina's desire for children becomes all-consuming and attracts her to Mary, who has children easily. These desires cross-pollinate the friendship between the women, even as they stunt its growth, and their relationship develops from this baseline of bald need and envy.

Hoover has a knack for spare description that evokes the particular emotions and moralities of farm life:

Borden's hands were clean and white. Not a hardworking man. Religious. He would never understand what it meant to pray to a field. To feed and watch over the animals that ruled the fat of our stomachs. We looked in hope to the ground and the roots growing there more often than we looked for graces from the sky. [End Page 15]

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She writes carefully through her characters' psychologies without ever revealing too much or stepping away from the lyric but plainspoken voice that makes The Quickening so powerful. The American farmer is not an archetype that evokes many thoughts about desire. Yet desire is everywhere in this novel, bubbling just under the surface of these pragmatic lives. Hoover allows Enidina and Mary heartachey spikes of insight into their own longings: "What I wanted felt like a hunger, rising from my ribs, my throat, starved for something immense, golden. Jack was greater than many a man, but he could give me only sons and mud and butchered meat—I wanted something clean." While her tone never wavers, Hoover balances these lyrically and psychologically precise moments with haunting descriptions of wild Midwestern weather, and scenes of strange violence and cruelty. When tragedy arrives, it is written in that same expectant, matter-of-fact tone that says as much about the everyday tragedy...

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