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Hilary Jordan's Mudbound is an outstanding debut novel.

The basic plotline - Henry McAllan moves his wife, Laura, and their 2 daughters from the city to a rural rundown farm with none of the modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing. To add to this change, Henry's father, the deeply racist and selfish Pappy moves in with them. The Jacksons, a black sharecropping tenant family on the farm, have their own mule and are better off than many southern blacks. Setting off a cascading chain of events, Jamie, Henry's much younger brother, and Ronsel, Hap and Florence Jackson's oldest son, return from the war. Jamie is haunted by his experiences flying bomber plane missions over Germany. Rosel, a sergeant who commanded his small tank crew, became involved with a white German woman and relished that his skin color made little difference in war-torn Europe. He struggles with the attitudes of southern whites upon his return.

Jordan makes a bold choice to tell her tale chronologically from multiple points of view. By doing so, I get to know each character and get a more complete picture of the story. The drawback is that I am left wanting a little more of each of these characters. Pappy, the villain of the piece, does not get a chapter. I get very few glimpses into his backstory and how he comes to be who he is at this time. Jordan's characters are multi-dimensional and relatable except for Pappy.

Set in 1940's Mississippi, Jordan brings her setting to life. Once she moves the story to the delta region I can hear the rains and feel the sucking mud. She explores the varying levels of racism from deep hatred in Pappy to a mild feeling of superiority in Laura to the seeming indifference of skin color in the Austrian-born doctor. She shows me the haunting consequences of this hate and asks me to take a deep look into my own heart and examine my intolerances.

I find this setting and these characters a strong contrast to the characters on Wendell Berry's Port Williams farms. (I recently read Hannah Coulter.) Berry's stories are about community and coming together. Jordan's story is one of strife and differences and division. What these characters share is what Jordan dubs "land sickness," a love of the land so deep that it is part of them.

So what is now on my mind? I have a few people of varying skin tones in my life who migrated north. They never felt completely at home, even in the mid-Atlantic. They returned south to the positives they missed while searching for pockets of people who shared their values. Feeling more in their skins in some ways, they bristle at intolerant attitudes, and work toward social justice in their small ways. One of the questions this read has stirred in me is the definition of home and how to live in an imperfect world. How complicit am I in retaining that world? What ability do I have to effect change? And what am I willing to do?

Publication 2008