The Diamond Doorknob (review)

It would seem impossible to write a novel with less than three hundred pages and four characters who are gifted with psychic ability—two of them Cherokee—without the whole thing seeming like an overblown, New-Age melodrama, but MariJo Moore has pulled it off. After having produced books of her own poetry, collections of others' creative work that she has edited, and a fine collection of short stories, Red Woman with Backward Eyes, Moore has now published her first novel, The Diamond Doorknob. In it, she manages to somehow recreate a diverse southern world of 1920s to 1940s Tennessee and North Carolina with wonderfully-drawn characters who come off as totally realistic, yet haunting and intriguing. The novel resonates with influences from William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and T. R. Pearson to Louise Erdrich and Leslie Silko. There might even be a little Toni Morrison in there. The milieu of this novel is the South, but it's an Indian South, an Irish South, an African American South, and even a Dutch South. In short, it is a mixed South where everything but nothing is changing. It is a South where no one is perfect and every character is human—no heroes or heroines, no protagonists and antagonists here, just people. It is a South where tragedy and happiness are so intertwined and families are so dysfunctional despite love that they must be real. It is a South where the supernatural is natural, and Cherokees sound like Cherokees, not mystic, nature-loving crystal wavers—even when some crystal gazing, or glass doorknob gazing to be specific, is involved.

It is a Southern novel complete with the prerequisite "cripple," good 'ole Southern racism, and a fair portion of alcoholism, incest, and poverty. There's Levi Eros Macklin, the one-armed man who is sexy enough to seduce the best-looking woman in the book, and Cornelia, his green-eyed, Irish gypsy-looking mother who serves up her own style of marital justice by cheating on her man in return for his drunken binges.

She was unbelievably beautiful. Tall, thin, and pale skinned with dark black hair. Her eyes were the brightest green he had ever seen. His mother was a dreamer and a little mad, perhaps. There was a sense of disaster inside her constantly struggling with the sense of purpose growing inside him. She lived with him, just beneath the surface of his soul. Her voice was the first he heard at birth and it burned a hole in his spirit that he was to carry to his grave. She loved him, this he never doubted, but he could never figure out exactly what she expected of him.

(16)

There is poker-playing and moonshine with a little wife beating and murder to boot. Oh, and an accidental suicide. We love those in the South.

That's what happens when you're drunk and depressed and you get "aholt" of a butcher knife and it's raining. But as a reader, you get caught up in it as much as you do when reading Faulkner. You care about these characters' crazy lives because Moore plays it straight, and she is a good reader of human behavior as well. Miss Breedlove—love that name for this character—has to have a pink, frilly bedroom because that's the kind of boudoir this aging multiple-divorcée would have:

a collage of cotton candy pink and talcum powder white. Pink lace netting, which was draped over the four-poster bed, floated to the floor where it landed in clumps on the oval white rug. Heavy pink velvet drapes covered two small windows behind the bed. In between the windows, hung daintily on the floral wallpaper, was a crucifix, the Christ head hanging low, as if it were ashamed to be in such tidy surroundings.

(95)

The characters who make racist remarks have to make them because...