Two tragedies occurred in the early 1940s that were so deadly, gruesome and sudden, it’s a wonder that collective conversation about them was ever able to wither. In Jill McCorkle’s latest novel, “Hieroglyphics,” these historical events serve as weight-bearing pillars for a thoroughly existential story that inspects mortality, the passage of time and the inadequacies of human communication.
The first catastrophe happened in November 1942, when a fire at Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub killed hundreds of people who’d come to dance. The second took place the next year, when scores of passengers died after a train smashed into a derailed train one snowy December night in North Carolina. McCorkle treats these true cases tenderly and spawns fiction by creating a connection between two people who were kids when they lost parents in the disasters.
Lil’s mother, a glamorous, 34-year-old dance instructor, had gone to the club that night without telling anyone. Frank’s father was on the train, one of many servicemen who had “managed to stay alive in the war and then were on their way home for Christmas, perhaps waking in time to realize their lives were over.” Lil and Frank’s bond over these similar tragedies contributes to their marriage, or what one relative refers to as a “Morbidity Match.”
We meet Lil and Frank after they’ve started life over in an unexpected place, a theme deployed in some of McCorkle’s other novels, such as her acclaimed Life After Life. Lil has emphysema, Frank has a heart that’s about to explode and neither of their brains are what they used to be, so they leave their home of 50-plus years in Massachusetts to be closer to their daughter, Becca. The couple lands in a North Carolina golf course community where they have trouble adjusting to “the constant chatter and hospitality and all that hugging.”
Frank, a retired educator fascinated by the myths and history of the ages such as Paleolithic cave art and burial practices, worries Lil when he tells her he’s ready to die soon. But their new proximity to the site of the train wreck, plus the house Frank moved into with his baby brother and mother once her injuries from the crash healed, intrigues him. His dredged-up memories are so persistent that he asks Shelley, the woman who now lives there, to let him inside for a look-see.
Shelley’s job as a court stenographer, which requires her to record “pounds and pounds of notes about weapons and threats and murder and guilt,” has taught her to question everyone. She finds Frank’s request creepy. Having grown up in racist and abusive squalor, she doesn’t understand wanting to go back to where you came from. She denies his request, but their brief interaction serves as an entry point into the world she shares with her youngest son Harvey, a sweet 6-year-old obsessed with ghosts and serial killers.
Despite Shelley’s work and Harvey’s imagination, the duo offers much of the book’s levity. Harvey invents a superhero whose power is supersonic hearing that allows him to detect “murderers about to murder” in time for him to intervene. Super Monkey’s message to the universe? “Don’t get kilt.” While recording macabre court cases, Shelley distracts herself by writing alternate versions. In one, the judge high fives her after complimenting her ability to take notes faster than anyone on the East Coast.
Credit: HANDOUT
Credit: HANDOUT
Lil’s narrative is told through epistolary chapters, mostly containing her letters and notes that she hopes will be read one day by her descendants instead of the depressing alternative: a stranger disposing of them. She casually weaves between recounting treasured memories, parsing through her husband’s past wrongdoing and doling out sharp analyses of her children’s behaviors. Lil dominates the story’s emotional power by reflecting on her life as she unwillingly nears its end, with memories that aren’t always consciously conjured.
Notes from others are also included in Lil’s documents. A cute Mother’s Day IOU from their son in 1965 is juxtaposed with a stern 1988 note from Becca begging her mom to stop giving her divorce advice. According to Becca, Lil’s whole life is “defined by losing your mother young and wishing that she had been there to advise you at every turn (or thinking you do), but that is not my story.” Lil’s thoughts reveal her lifelong struggle to make sense of her mother’s death. Every year on the anniversary, she sets aside 12 minutes — the length of time it took the fire to wreak its terrible havoc — to remember.
Littered throughout the book are indications of language’s utilitarian evolution: passwords of dead pet and childhood street names that we need to remember “just to live in this time we’re in”; Lil’s father’s notes about how to play chess that make no sense to her; shorthand that Shelley thinks is “an art like cursive” — although some say it’s a dying language, being replaced by recording equipment. Despite these myriad ways of manipulating language, Shelley fails to tell her sons the truth about their respective fathers; Frank can’t find the right words to say he was sorry; and no one has communicated with the dead.
Articulation isn’t a problem for McCorkle, whose mastery of words as a vehicle to deliver raw emotions never wavers. “Hieroglyphics” dwells in nostalgia and the inevitable pain that’s built into the contract of life, but like a good therapy session, it proves rewarding.
FICTION
By Jill McCorkle
Algonquin
312 pages, $26.95
Virtual author events
Jill McCorkle. The author talks about “Hieroglyphics” to “Summerlings” author Lisa Howorth via Zoom at 6 p.m. Aug. 19. Register by emailing rsvp@squarebooks.com.
