I finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018) last week. I meant to post while the reading was in progress, but I find that really great books intimidate me into silence. I feel like whatever I say will be inadequate, or that I will end up merely gushing, which I hate. I think this is the best novel I’ve read since Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, which I read 16 years ago. It was a tremendous, worldwide bestseller, but I don’t follow contemporary literature. I came to this through the 2022 movie, which I discussed in two posts: https://forums.online-go.com/t/how-was-your-day-regular-part-ii/46165/6324 and https://forums.online-go.com/t/how-was-your-day-regular-part-ii/46165/6328. Although the movie is an excellent adaptation, the book is vastly richer.
I previously called this a coming-of-age story, but really it is a bildungsroman, as it treats the protagonist’s development over a long time, not merely at one crucial moment. It tells of an abandoned girl, Kya, who, from an early age, survives on her own in the swamp and marsh of southern North Carolina. The story treats many themes with great depth and sensitivity: survival, learning from nature, otherness, love, and betrayal.
One of the most beautiful aspects of the book is the empathy, love, and help she gets from a Black couple “Jumpin’” and Mabel, who own a small grocery and gas station (for motorboats). They know, of course, what it means to be reviled and outcast from the mainstream of society.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is the writing. Original metaphors and observations appear on nearly every page, yet the writing is simple and direct. It’s like a Faulkner Southern Gothic, as it would be written by Hemingway. She often uses real observations as commentary on the action. The best example of this is after a pig of a man seduces Kya at a motel: “As he passed into sleep, she watched the blinking lights of the Vacancy sign.”
While the movie was a big commercial success, 70% of the critics hated it (because they didn’t understand the ending). A similar phenomenon, though not so extreme, exists in the literary reception, but for a different reason. It appears that the book may have been wrongly marketed as a thriller, which it isn’t. However, I have been surprised and discouraged by the number of readers in vlogs and Goodreads, who complain that the story is “slow.” It seems that the ethos of comic-book movies has now infected the literati. Anything that isn’t continuous action or dialogue is condemned. Throw out Austen, Dickens, Melville, Conrad, etc.—the whole pantheon of literature is slow by such a standard.
About the title: I have never heard that as a Southern idiom, and the Dictionary of American Regional English does not list it. Consequently, I didn’t know what it meant when I saw the movie. The novel gave the answer from context. Crawdads don’t sing, of course, except in one’s imagination. Therefore, “where the crawdads sing” is a metaphor for the most secret place. It’s a mark of our decadent culture that one stupid film critic mocked the title, thinking he had scored a huge point by observing that crawdads don’t sing.
