No Paradise to Lose: C. E. Morgan's Disfigured Eden in All the Living

It's difficult for a reader, when confronted by a novel titled out of Ecclesiastes, not to be alert for every inference of typology that follows. It becomes even more difficult when the book jacket tells you that its author holds a Master's in Theology from Harvard Divinity School. This reader, to make matters worse, lacks the intellectual discipline required not to approach this beautiful, economical novel the first time through as anything but an eschatological parable at heart. Now, what most recommends experiencing All the Living through the Biblical lens—assuming you're not an Evangelical waiting breathlessly on the Rapture—is that it makes a tale tightly circumscribed within a region that is alien to its reader rather more familiar and comfortable. Whatever else it may be, the Biblical landscape is no terra incognita, after all. This is a good thing in the particular case of C. E. Morgan's gem of a novel, because neither the region nor the circumstances afford its young protagonist Aloma, and Orren (whose given name, according to a local minister who figures prominently in the tale, is Orpheus; now there's a descent-and-resurrection type for you), who is her lover and equally her antagonist, no comforts at all.

It can also be difficult to allegorize Morgan's narrative even as a purely heuristic reading exercise without its metaphorical constituents freezing into position like some neo-Spenserian parable predetermined by its Biblical references. What keeps All the Living vital and alive is that, like its spirited young protagonist, it pushes right back against such readerly impositions. It never settles into a predictable teleology or kowtows to its narrative sources. Morgan adroitly turns her wealth of typological images upside-down, inside-out, busting them down to their iconic constituents and then scrambling and re-arranging them. She also insinuates bits of classical mythology into the mix at sly angles, which further destabilizes the certainties of Old Testament allegoresis. It's a nifty balancing act that a reader who isn't looking for textual resistance (and let's face it, most readers aren't) only notices the second time through the story, and then only when deliberately prowling Morgan's prose for it. In their simultaneous insistence and inchoateness, disfigured resonances of Genesis haunt her tale of Aloma and Orren's belated coming of age. They also animate the roles of the secondary and ancillary characters who are so crisply etched into the peripheries of Orren's and Aloma's lives, much as they might inhabit the cultural fabric of the Eastern Kentucky countryside itself.

All the Living is a third-person narrative that nevertheless hugs the contours of Aloma's psyche and affords any number of windows directly into her conflicted sensibilities. At the same time, it views the actions, thoughts, and emotions of the rest of its characters at arm's distance. Within a few pages of her arrival at her lover's farm, whose upkeep he must take over when his mother and older brother are accidentally killed, the narrative loops back to Aloma's childhood, youth, adolescence, and deflowering. This retrospective section feels like her own reaction to being wrenched from the womb of her schooling to become the unmarried mistress of a tobacco farm for which familiarity breeds antipathy. At the conclusion of this mnemonic narrative the story reverts to tracking Aloma's engagement with her new and unsatisfactory environment and with her bereaved, introverted lover.

Morgan's ridge country landscape is layered up out of a welter of erotically charged, mostly (but not exclusively) phallic imagery. This natural phallocracy does more than lie neutralized in the background; it rings Aloma round, an eroticized spiritual incarceration. Where maternal or matriarchal symbolism appears, the sense of confinement remains acute, especially early in her life:

The school carried her into a deeper cleavage in the mountains than the one she had known at her uncle's trailer, which jagged out like an aluminum finger from a limestone wall topped by firs, bone out of bone. There the night carried...