Not every family gathering for the holiday meets the happy Norman Rockwell standard. Instead, deeply held differences of opinion can be all it takes to raise loud, angry voices. Add in memories of childhood trauma, plus a holiday outburst remembered from the year before, and you have the nervous tension of the fictional Whitby family anticipating their annual Christmas Eve dinner together.
The Spirits, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fourth novel and most recent book (released Oct. 13), is a departure from her previous long fiction. Both literally and metaphorically, the fictional setting is more interior than outdoors this time around.
The Spirits shares with Campbell’s first novel, Q Road, a compressed timeline, giving us this time a family on Christmas Eve: widow Linda Whitby, her four children, and the older son’s girlfriend around a dinner table for most of the story, the living Linda somehow a less substantial presence—at least in the mind of Sis, to which the author gives us access—than her late husband, Henry, bullying patriarch and father of Sis, Doug, Trevor, and Beth.
Is Doug’s girlfriend, Mary (the surprise non-family guest at the table), a stand-in for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens? She does use crutches to get around, having been struck by lightning when young and told she would never walk again, and her general outlook on the world seems bright and happy (Tiny Timish), but when I read the novel I didn’t put too much weight on that as a literary allusion, even if the author intended it. Instead I met Mary and her boyfriend’s family as I would meet any new people here in Michigan, curious to see how they would reveal themselves—to me, the reader, to each other, and to Mary, the newcomer.
While Mary is a catalyst for the direction taken by the holiday dinner table conversation, it is primarily the thoughts and feelings of Sis Whitby that the author gives us. Sis is tormented by Christmases past, both the Christmas of nine years ago, when her father died, and the one only twelve months past, when she herself was the cause of a blowup the family has yet to put fully behind them. Sis carries a load of guilt for both previous Christmases and longs to confess and be forgiven, but fear of another dinner table explosion chokes back her words. What she doesn’t realize is that other family members have their own confessions to make and that everyone has given a different interpretation to the father’s death nine years earlier.
Along with page-turning suspense, we encounter in The Spirits Campbell's usual signature preoccupations, Sis’s devotion to the world of green growing things and a country family’s growing, harvesting, and preserving its own food. These authorial preoccupations are never peripheral but are intrinsic to her stories. In this case, it is in caring for trees and other growing plants, if anywhere, that Sis will eventually find redemption and salvation. Like Rachel Crane in Q Road, Margo Crane in Once Upon a River, the Zook women in The Waters, and Campbell herself (at home in rural Kalamazoo County with her donkeys and her husband, “darling Christopher), Sis Whitby is rooted in Michigan soil, and I am one Michigan bookseller grateful to Campbell for putting us on the American literary map.
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| Bonnie Jo at Dog Ears Books, 2015 |
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| Author at home with one of her donkeys |
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