Set inside the boggy South, Jon Pineda’s “Let’s No One Get Hurt” is a Venus flytrap of a book: come too close and it just might get you. Its main character is a 16-year-old tomboy named Pearl, the quick-witted daughter of academic parents who’s become a swamp rat out of dire necessity.
“Everything is barely holding on to the next thing,” she informs us in this lively first-person account of growing up on the contemporary margin, of coping with her mother’s early death and her father’s descent into alcoholic grief. Her low-down gallows humor and preternatural wisdom lighten the melancholy of adolescent catastrophe, a subject that the author of this compassionate novel understands quite well.
Pearl is hungry all the time; her chest, she confides, is “flat like a block of ice.” Her shoes are cardboard-thin, but she’s smart as a boot. Her late mother, a scholar who was working on a paper about the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, once explained a math problem to her “using Zeno’s dichotomy paradox.”
Dad is an inebriated, half-baked Prospero who’s lost his tenure at the nearby college. He instructs Pearl on biological classifications. He wears a pinstriped vest without a shirt — never a sign of anything good. He lives in a nebulous artistic fantasy, weeps intermittently and reads “the same poems as his wife read out loud around the clock.”
They’ve fled to a piece of marshland festooned with “gutted washing machines” and barely functioning vehicles. There’s no electricity; it’s like the frontier is happening all over again. Their menu consists of crayfish, catfish, chanterelles, chicory root coffee, pawpaw fruit and brown cattails that “taste like corn.”
With an ailing hound named Marianne Moore, they share a derelict boathouse with Dox and Fritter, an African-American father and son who tutor Pearl in the ways of the wild and preside as the novel’s ethical soul. In a way, they’re protective river deities who know how to make themselves invisible.
Dox is a tall-tale teller and a busker who plays cigar box slide-guitar on his favorite song, Son Volt’s “Drown.” (“The notes wove and blended like pocket water,” says Pearl, describing Dox’s style.)
Fritter is “motor-oil black, like he was spit out of some great big flame-shooting engine.” In a bleak situation, he’s the ever-resourceful veteran, lashing together an emergency raft of stolen plywood sheeting and “army-grade” gasoline canisters. When Pearl asks him if it will float, Fritter retorts, “The river will let us know quick if it won’t.”
It’s not exactly Eden, but at least it’s a focused lifestyle, that is, until the arrival of their neighbor, Mason Boyd, and his gang of spoiled rich kids, who Pearl dubs “the flies.” Destined to become the future baronets of Dixie, the flies live in a community that’s a new kind of country club suburb, the kind without a country club.
They recklessly scoot around in jumped-up golf carts pretending to be sportsmen by shooting up road signs. They “want to be ready for an attack” and have plans to make survivalist videos. Mason and the flies are nihilistic and mean, yet they roll orbicular around Pearl, fascinated by her undomesticated persona. They cruelly describe her as a “dog” but want her to star in the “film” they’re making. Wary, Pearl goes along — having no friends her age, she wants to be accepted — but Dox, Fritter and even Pearl’s neglectful daddy are suspicious of this pampered crowd, and the trio stands surreptitiously on-guard.
Looming over “Let’s No One Get Hurt” is the accelerating division between rich and poor — the subinfeudation of 21st century American life. To Pearl, the land and water are “borrowed,” which is to say, “the river … doesn’t care whether we’re here to drift on it or not.” To the fathers of the flies — “land developers and judges who dress up on weekends as Civil War reenactors” — property is power. They’re encircling Pearl and her ragtag family’s riverside pea patch. They want it just to have it, and they’re going to take it if they can.
Ownership of the land is the mystery at the heart of “Let’s No One Get Hurt,” Pineda’s little touch of Dickens; it beetles the plot along and gives the reader hope that no one really will get hurt.
Pearl’s unexpected relationship with Mason Boyd is the most difficult part of “Let’s No One Get Hurt.” The book’s kinetic teenage lovemaking — which Mason films, of course — is delicate, risky material, but Pineda handles it well, or as well as it can be handled.
Jon Pineda is also an award-winning poet, so it’s not surprising that “Let’s No One Get Hurt” has images that dart into view like dagger fish: the river, through the optics of Pearl, “almost doesn’t exist, like the blue of skim milk”; the air “is a dress made of pink insulation”; the landscape “is the color of sweet tea. It hurts my teeth to take it all in.”
“Let’s No One Get Hurt” is a tale of rough justice in a tight spot: If it weren’t rough, it wouldn’t be justice. Pearl recalls her mother’s advice: “Don’t be afraid … or you’ll just be like everyone else.” Her shield is an alloy of stoicism and self-awareness: “I know I’m not a woman yet. But I’m also not a girl. I’m a poem no one will ever translate.”
If Pineda’s novel has a straight-ahead message, it’s that every place in the South, or America, or anywhere on Earth, is a center of life for someone or some thing: plants bend toward the sun.
FICTION
‘Let’s No One Get Hurt’
by Jon Pineda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages, $25
