HIEROGLYPHICS
By Jill McCorkle
A good novel can perform the same perception-bending trick as a lockdown: slowing time, throwing light on shadowed corners, reminding us of the interdependencies among us that we once took for granted.
In her vibrant, engaging fiction, Jill McCorkle has given voice to characters on both sides of the divide between professionals and the essential workers who sustain them — her sixth and most recent novel, “Life After Life,” was set in a retirement home in North Carolina. McCorkle’s art lies in chronicling the many minor episodes that build one person’s unique life. In her new novel, “Hieroglyphics,” 85-year-old Lil Wishart and her husband, Frank, have recently moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina to be closer to their adult daughter. There Lil is assembling selections from her years of journal entries: memories of kids’ arguments, affectionate stories and painful ones about Frank. In a letter to their children, Becca and Jeff, Lil describes this anthology as “my contribution to evolution, the unearthing and dusting of the prints and markers that led me here.”
If McCorkle’s imagined group home, Pine Haven, connected the large cast of “Life After Life,” a single house links the two families of “Hieroglyphics”: Shelley, a diligent court recorder, lives with her two sons in the house (now somewhat run-down) where Frank grew up. Since returning to North Carolina, Frank is eager to visit his old home, where he and his mother lived after the tragedy that marred his childhood. Shelley warily waves Frank away with a line about her soon-to-return husband, though in fact she is raising her sweet 6-year-old, Harvey, alone — her older son, by a different absent father, has recently started college. Shelley’s long days are spent logging the proceedings of a grim murder trial, her mind filled with its distressing details and worries over Harvey.
The murder victim worked as an aesthetician in a retirement home, her death staged to look like a suicide by the married doctor with whom she was having an affair. These circumstances form a closing episode in “Life After Life,” and though “Hieroglyphics” is self-contained, it will be a richer story for readers already familiar with some of these characters. Shelley is haunted by the young woman’s fatal mistake, feels pity for the young son she left behind and silent rage at the entitled doctor. Having come from an abusive family, Shelley “learned early that she was treated best when not noticed … no one wants what the average or below-average person has, and so they leave you alone, and sometimes being left alone seems the best choice.”
The novel is full of ghosts and hauntings, tombs and cemeteries. Harvey’s anxious imagination dwells on murder stories his older brother told him, of Lizzie Borden, the Menendez brothers and local horrors. Frank, a retired academic, used to study burial rituals, “the myths of death and all the ancient beliefs of the afterlife,” so he knows well the importance of relics and the magical thinking of trying to keep the dead alive. Lil’s earlier years volunteering in hospice care helped her sort through her own grief over the early loss of her mother, in a devastating accident that created the coincidence that first drew Frank and Lil together.
Lil’s mother died in the terrible (real-life) Cocoanut Grove fire that killed almost 500 people in Boston in 1942, and Frank’s father died in a December 1943 train accident (also real) outside of Fayetteville, N.C. His mother, returning to Massachusetts with her husband, only survived the wreck because she was using the train’s bathroom when the crash occurred; badly injured, she stayed in North Carolina to convalesce, and eventually brought young Frank down to join her. The shock of these losses has reverberated throughout Frank’s and Lil’s lives, giving them both a stark sense of the before and after of tragedy, and driving Lil to be for her own children the focused mother she herself lacked.
The tone of “Hieroglyphics” is dreamier and more interior than that of McCorkle’s previous novel. Alternating sections center on Frank and Lil, Shelley and Harvey — but mostly when they are alone, reflecting on their past or present. Frank walks the tracks where his father died, still imagining the accident, while Lil stays home tethered to her oxygen tank, worrying that Frank might take things in hand to forestall a bad ending. McCorkle explores the poignant territory of an aging couple discussing how to die, as Lil writes to Jeff and Becca, “Your father has lately pitched death like one of his adventurous trips or a romantic rendezvous.”
The novel builds slowly toward both the end of the murder trial as well as a resolution for Frank and Lil. McCorkle, a generous, humane writer, knows that facing death allows us, as this terrible pandemic has, to focus on what is essential: how to take care of our vulnerable, and to appreciate the connections that sustain us. The maternal hearts of Lil and Shelley are the central force of “Hieroglyphics.” If Lil is making sense of her own life for her children, it is partly so that down the line, they can do the same for theirs. “My wish is that you both are in lives that provide loving and trustworthy souls who can hear your story.”
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