Flood: A Novel

I am back in my hometown, Hannibal, Missouri. Not physically, but in the pages of FLOOD, the captivating debut novel by another Hannibal homie, Melissa Scholes Young. The novel was published in June by Center Street, a division of Hachette.FLOOD is set in Hannibal ten years after the cataclysmic Mississippi river flood of 1993, which threatened Mark Twain's town with submersion and inundated 320,000 square miles of the Midwest, nearly a twelfth of the nation's terrain.But meteorology is hardly Scholes Young's concern here; nor, really, is Mark Twain, despite his constant resonating presence at the edges of the story. (The author interesperses her narrative with pertinent allusions to Twain and excerpts from his works.) Scholes Young's pursuit is classic and eternal: "the human heart in conflict with itself," in William Faulkner's mighty phrase. In Scholes Young's hands, the conflict is waged with fierce consummate compassion and, finally, apocalyptic and enigmatic grace.Laura Brooks, the novel's narrator, has retreated back to Hannibal after a failed ten-year sojourn in Florida. She'd lit out from the threatened town, her down-and-out roots, and her suitor Sammy McGuire at age of 18 in hopes of gaining control of her destiny as the floodwaters lapped. A lost job, a lost pregnancy, and lost dreams shoo her back home.She returns under similarly darkening skies to face her resentful Mama, amidst her chickens in the family trailer near the river. ("Mama stands inside their pen with a basket of fresh eggs. She couldn't be prouder if she'd laid them herself." Mama, wary that her daughter has gone all "fancy" as a hifalutin nurse's assistant in Florida, is slow to return her daughter's affection: "Take those shitkickers off in the house," and: "Unless that smart degree made you forget where you're from.")Laura edgily eases herself back into the tattered old town still licking its wounds from Twain's glorifying legacy. It is part of Scholes Young's gift to construct a Hannibal at once mythic and prosaic: mythic in its helpless symbiosis with Mark Twain; prosaic in the dreary particulars of its present plight.There she encounters her old life sweeping before her like a panorama: her adrift biker-brother, Trey; her desperate fading beauty of a best friend, Rose; Rose's ardent young son, Bobby; Rose's boozing husband Josh--and, inevitably, Sammy himself; gentle, fatally mis-construed Sammy, eddying up behind her as she sits alone beside the Mississippi one night, stretching her arm into the frigid water. ("For a second I consider just sinking into the water and letting the current carry me. But knowing him, he'd jump in, even if he thought I was a stranger.")It is exactly this concision, this remarkable capacity of Scholes to couch decisive moments in prosewriting shorn of affect, that compels the reader to follow along in Laura Brooks's deceptively gentle wake. We collaborate in the contours of Laura's fateful return and the fraught moral decisions her return imposes on her, instead of merely absorb them. We're avid to help fashion what the late John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream."This voice holds as steady as a levee through the novel's rising arc of dead-ended hope, birth and sundering, the bitter pizza-and-doughnuts pleasures and furies of the smalltown dispossessed.At the novel's conclusion, Scholes Young's control increases the impact of abrupt plot reversal. Egged on by Huck's whispered voice in her ear--"All right, then, I'll go to hell!" she performs an act startling in its departure from our expectations. Is it an act of violation or of redemption? The reader must decide. In the act of deciding, the reader is compeled to complete the novel's vivid and continuous dream.FLOOD, being the provenance of a Hannibal writer, already and tiresomely has been placed in the lineage of Mark Twain. This is fair neither to Scholes Young nor to the father of modern fiction. Her debut book makes a few graceful curtsies to Sam, yet it stands on its own, sui generis.

"Should I stay or should I go?" Those words from the famous Clash song of the 80s rang in my ears as I was pulled into Laura Brooks's dilemma about whether her life will unfold back in her hometown of Hannibal or on a path that leads her to another destiny. Many of us feel like Flood's main character: we adore the friends and family that formed our childhood but, especially if we've left home for college or jobs, we wonder if we've changed too much to fit back in? Or whether going home feels like a step backward?In Flood, Melissa Scholes Young weaves together the loudest of family gatherings set on the banks of the lush and threatening Mississippi River, and layers the life of Mark Twain and his characters into the past and present of the town of Hannibal. She brings us right into the middle of the lives of characters whose voices are honest, raw, hilarious, and sometimes hurtful - just like family and best friends can be. Laura's story asks what we all ask ourselves, especially in our late twenties, still working out relationships and life paths: do I belong? Will I be loved? Who am I and what is my purpose?I'm always captivated by stories about female friendship and navigating motherhood. The friendship-since-kindergarten between Laura and her feisty best friend Rose is equal parts exasperation, laughter, and loyalty. The two friends test each other and stand by each other, even though sometimes they're circling like two fighters sizing up a rival. Laura's mother shows more outward affection to the chickens she's raising than to her own daughter, and yet in the author's deft hands, we see her revealed eventually as fiercely loving, just unspeakably hurt by what life has thrown at her. In a lovely riff on the many mothers we might have in our lives, we meet Aunt Betty, who is independent and insightful and always offers even a grown up Laura a warm lap to crawl into.A friend told me he'd realized as he'd gotten older that "most people are honestly just trying to do the best they can." In Flood, Scholes Young gives us characters in a rural world who are doing their best as life comes at them. Some of them, like Rose, or Laura's brother Trey, make bad decisions driven by youth or desperation. Others like Laura's mother or the young girl living in a trailer at the end of the road struggle to defy what life has thrown at them: a husband's alcoholism, a parent's death, the Mississippi flood waters. Not all of these characters are likable, but you will care about them because even when they fall short, the author treats them with respect. These voices are real; they're funny; they're honest, rude, endearing and loyal. I wanted to wrap my arms around Bobby, Rose's son, and just high-five him for his resilience. You'll find a favorite character too.I highly recommend Flood for its plot, characters, setting, pacing, and themes. An intelligent, lively, engaging read that you will think about long after you turn the final pages.

This was a surprising and enjoyable read. I love when Southern novels give the feel of suffocating heat like this. Well done.