The Meat and Spirit Plan

by Selah Saterstrom

“Like an experimentally inclined Annie Proulx, Saterstrom tersely renders the effects of social violence on individual lives . . . the effect is shattering and transcendent.”—Modern Times Bookstore newsletter In lyric, diamond-cut prose, Selah Saterstrom revisits the mythic, dead-end Southern town of Beau Repose. This time, the story follows a strung-out American teenager influenced by heavy metal, inspired by Ginger Rogers, hell-bent on self-destruction, and more intelligent than anyone around her realizes. She is forced into rehab and private school, and her life, at least on the surface, changes course, eventually leading to theology studies in Scotland. But as the feverish St. Vitus’s dance of her adolescence morphs into slow-motion inertia abroad, an illness brings her home again—to face the legacy of pain she left behind and to find a way to become the lead in a dance of her own creation. An heir to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Saterstrom soars above the traditional boundaries of the American novel with “exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language” (Raleigh News & Observer ) that makes her novels “impossible to put down.” Spare, raw, and transcendent, Saterstrom’s unflinching examination of modern-day Dixie and contemporary adolescence lights up the dark corners of the American experience. Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Pink Institution, a debut novel praised across the country for “letting gusts of fresh, tart air blow into the old halls of Southern Gothic” ( The Believer ). A Mississippi native, she is currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program. Visit her website at www.selahsaterstrom.com.

Genres: Fiction, Southern Gothic, Gothic, Poetry, Southern, Novels

225 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. In 2016 Essay Press will publish a collection of her essays on Divinatory Poetics. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom is a brilliant, brutal book. It is a coming-of-age novel, but unlike one I’ve ever read. Imagine Kathy Acker writing the Little House on the Prairie series, and you’ll gain a vague glimmer of Saterstrom’s unique prose. Her novel simultaneously produces feelings of horror and beauty, for in the main character’s world there is no separation between these two elements. For example, after the main character (readers never discover her name) moves from Mississippi to Glasgow, she experiences reoccurring dreams where she’s in the same room with a butcher. Some nights the butcher slaughters animals like cows or pigs, but other nights he hacks women and children. The narrator muses, “…I never know what I will find in the butcher’s room. Sometimes a cow, sometimes a pig, sometimes a person. When it is a cow or pig I feel calm during the day. When it is a person I feel hysterical.” These passages read like Brueghel paintings that have come to life: violent, terrifying, but also beautiful.

Saterstrom has created a captivating narrative, one deeply connected to the South. She has conjured a world where Ginger Rogers, Derrida, and The Blue Lagoon people cohabit the same spaces. Her sentences are immaculately structured, and if you read slowly, you’ll find yourself learning humorous, horrifying information about her characters and narrative with each passage. The Meat and Spirit Plan is an original, mesmerizing account of a young woman’s intellectual and sexual awakenings. I can’t recommend it enough.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book says a lot in a very measured way - a series of scenes or vignettes that are sometimes more poetry than prose which stack on top of each other to form a narrative centered on a character who is pretty fucked up but you want to love her because that's really what she needs. i think this book has a lot of potential for re-reading to glean the tidbits i'm sure i passed over the first time.

[Darshan Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

At its start, The Meat and Spirit Plan made me feel nervous, anxious even. The unnamed narrator's telling of her life is both subtle and brutal. Intimate violence seemed to define her childhood and adolescence, and readers were made its witness and survivor. The narrator describes her first experiences of sex with such dispassion that she too seems its witness, not its participant. I felt intense sensations of fear and familiarity, first in relation to my own childhood and adolescence and second in relation to my experiences as a college student and embodied spectator of Larry Clark's Kids: I was both on screen and in the audience. The narrator's invocation of feminist sexual identities of the college set was sheer brilliance, as was the evolution of her critical consciousness. I felt as those I was aging alongside the narrator, learning to name, recall, theorize. In the end, I loved this novel, including the discomfort it inspired.

[Sarah Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

i wrote about this as part of gabriel blackwell's one note series at small doggies.

[chantal · Rating 4 out of 5]

pure poetry. I journaled a lot of the lines from this book b/c the writing was really fascinating. it was short and bittersweet, navigating the life of a girl unsure of her place in the world

[Madeline Wolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in one sitting for David Ryan’s class. Adored.

[Carolyn Ostrowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know that the synopsis accurately describes the journey that this book was but, interesting thought provoking and entertaining nonetheless

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

CW: Sexual assault mention

"Breath is a hammer coming down"

Selah Saterstrom's coming-of-age novel "The Meat and Spirit Plan" follows a young Southern teenager from highschool to college who learns more and more about life's suffering and how one lives through that suffering. Saterstrom captures this transition from teenager to young adult so beautifully and seamlessly that I felt the transition to be incredibly natural. I understood how the main character's mind was being to turn in one and back around in another. In that way, I felt close to this character because of this fluidly; how a person can change so quickly and not.

However, I felt that this book's onslaught of traumatic events was not fully fleshed out and it lost its seamlessness. Especially towards the end where the character is sexually ass*ulted by the male nurse taking care of her. This may have been a comment on how these traumas will always be jarring and messy, but it interrupted the flow of aging. Additionally, the more experimental writing sections felt jarring in that same way, but I was not able to fully parse their connection and what their connection wanted from me.

[Tex Gresham · Rating 5 out of 5]

You ever look back on your life and try and piece it all together and all you're left with are these fragments that add up to something but maybe not the thing you thought your life added up to? That's what this book is like. Selah Saterstrom crafts a portrait of a young woman trying to transcend from who she was into who she wants to be. Yes, the book is brutal and abstract and doesn't seek to make you comfortable. But it's fucking beautiful. The moments are all condensed down to an essence that leave you feeling like you've just remembered something you've forgotten until just now––sometimes that's a good thing, but a lot of times it fucking sucks to remember. It's an odd book, poetic and rich. Don't be discourage. Walk along the roads Selah crafts in these pages and I promise you'll end it all being glad you took the first step.

[in8 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstom was like receiving an I.V. drip of bong water, pig placenta, T-bone steak, Anthrax (the band), bile, mayonnaise, mop water, ice, sex enzymes, unsalted crackers, pancreatic discharge, valium, Jack Daniels and Jell-O made from the flesh beneath toenails, but with the letters of the alphabet soup I.V. drip all beautifully scrambled and missing the letters E, N and S, and administered tenderly. Now kindly undo these straps!

[taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love this book. it's one of my favorites and i can never put it down once i pick it up. it's raw, gut wrenching, and sad but also funny and witty at times. the narrator is a mess but it's all she knows, so i can't help but love her. the fact that it doesn't end on an exceptionally "happy" note may bother some people, but stories don't have to have happy endings. sometimes it's nice to have a story end somewhat realistically.

[nineinchnovels · Rating 3 out of 5]

a rock and roll coming of age story that is dark, sprinkled with some surrealism, Metallica music, and deals with heavy topics.


It wasn’t my FAVORITE but I didn’t want to DNF, nor did I think to do so. So the book is just good enough.

[Elsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

i picked this up on a whim ! and did not expect to like it so much : painful, tough subjects , but irresistible prose thank u tim's books northampton for a good stock with fair prices love u xoxoxo

[pipenasty · Rating 3 out of 5]

this made me feel like reading an adult version of Go Ask Alice. it itched my brain, but i can’t tell in what way.

[Angelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE Saterstrom's writing style, and the gruesomeness of being a girl. I read most of this on an airplane while listening to Ethel Cain, which is so fitting for it all.

[Kinsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fear the era of plotless books is really over for me 😭

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

My feelings on this book are rather mixed. I absolutely did not like, in fact quite possibly hated, the first portion of the book. The narrator was completely unrelatable and uninteresting, defined by nothing more than sex and drugs. The portions about her life in college both in the South and in Scotland were somewhat better and had some interesting stuff I could relate to a bit more. The last few sections of the book, however, were not very good. Once the narrator goes to the hospital, the plot feels less interesting, and the mystery of the "night nurse" that isn't is never resolved, which is unsatisfying. The final section was utterly useless and didn't resolve anything. The front flap claims that the protagonist will make a plan for her life, but this wasn't really in evidence at all. I did not find the way the book was written to be particularly interesting. It seems to be a sort of journal/stream of consciousness narrative, but I found the way it was divided up to be arbitrary and not work very well. Over all, while I didn't hate this book completely, it was mainly because the middle of it was somewhat interesting and it was overall a short read. This definitely did not inspire me to read any of the author's other works, and I'd advise against reading this one if you can avoid it (I could not).

[Allison Floyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a word, eh. This book definitely has its moments: "...we can't all be stars or the night would be as bright as day." Actually, my favorite part was the very end, so maybe if she'd continued from there...Or maybe not. Maybe this book is just way too high concept for proletarian me. Or maybe the air of detachment--while I realize it's probably supposed to be symptomatic of the shock the narrator is experiencing throughout a seemingly endless series of brutal events--made it difficult, with rare exceptions, such as the beautifully rendered scene in which she goes on a crying jag after the death of her mother, to feel anything but detached. I've seen this done to harrowing effect before--Cruddy is a really good example--but for whatever reason, here it mostly read like a particularly poetic shopping list. I couldn't convince myself there was any reason--other than the natural outrage at what the narrator suffered--I should find this voice especially compelling or care.

I love the cover, though.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this book after being impressed by Selah Saterstrom's debut, The Pink Institution. The Meat and Spirit Plan didn't disappoint. In fact, it's grittier than Pink Institution - something that I appreciate when it's done well - and feels like it goes deeper into Saterstrom's studies in depraved deep South characters. I must admit, toward the middle of the book, the sexual abuse heaped upon the lead character starts to drag and become redundant and reductive, but only become the point has already been made: this intelligent girl's life is made terrifying by the people she's forced to live among while growing up. We can only hope for better once she leaves town... I'll stop there. As far as I'm concerned, this book makes me hopeful for the future of American fiction. Here's to more like it...

[Kira Henehan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books where the subject matter was of far less interest to me than the writing itself; I did NOT want to read anything to which the phrase "coming of age" could be applied and I did NOT want to read about the South and I did NOT want to read about drug abuse. I read it anyway, start to finish, because the writing and structure were, respectively, beautiful and innovative. It's a brutal story; where The Pink Institution gives a sort of general intro to the world of the truly degenerate south, this one narrows the focus to one voice living through it. Both books are beautiful objects as well.

[Nate Jordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up last night and couldn’t put it down, subconsciously compelled to read this amazing book from cover to cover in one sitting. Using compact, witty, and cathartic vignettes, Saterstrom transports the reader into the heart and mind of the nameless narrator, where the female heroine exposes her darkest secrets as if it’s a ritual, a rite of passage, as we follow her through childhood to early adulthood. The succession of scenes act as snapshots, the flashbulbs exploding in the mind leaving the reader in awe.

[Thaisa Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tough, lyric and wildly original short novel by Selah Saterstrom written outside the tedious box of American fiction. I'm sure a lot of people would like to call this a coming-of-age story, but graphic images of butchery and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson create a subtext that is a meditation on visceral life, the body itself. The book is sad without being self-pitying (particuarly images of the fictional narrator's early home life) and wildly funny (particularly about postmodernist studies in Scotland). A great read. It held me all the way.

[Sara Gerot · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetic voice was so painfully strong and controlled that it almost killed me. Somehow, within this poetic and fragmentary structure, there was a narrative. There was also a strong sense of setting, and even plot twists and turns on occasion. Really impressive. I would like to read it again, but I need to leave it alone for awhile. The material is so cutting that at points it is truly nauseating. In short, this book is unbelievable and not to be read lightly.

[Jac · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Super quick read. Think 3 train rides.

Saterstrom does an swesome job of keeping the reader moving through the text, while still keeping it really open and not providing all the answers. The narrative mode allows for lots of fun and surprising stuff to go on stylistically.

[Leilani Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew a girl who grew up in Mississippi listening to heavy metal, smoking pot, dropping acid, getting wasted, but all the while she was super smart and thinking about everything as it was happening. Selah Saterstrom tells this story in this dark, poetic book about life on the inside of a slaughtered ox girl.

[Derek Fenner · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great read. Structurally there was some Stein, maybe a hint of Flannery O'Connor with a ton of dashing one-liners that read with a poetic magnitude generally reserved for poems. I'll be picking up her first novel for sure. There's also this need to think of Poppy Z. Brite that won't let me leave this little review alone.

[Kaylyssa Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite parts were the sad-funny, raunchy, straightforward segments. Could have done without some of the more abstract language/sections when the rest of the book was so easy and pleasurable to read. In a weird way I found this book extremely realistic and relatable. I would definitely recommend this book, despite its minor imperfections.

[Alex Ambard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Meat and Spirit Plan is told through a series of vignettes. The disjointed form establishes a meter while providing the reader with unexpected details, discoveries, and thematic recognition. This felt like the most honest coming of age story since On the Road. The Meat and Spirit Plan is unlike anything you've read before and it's absolutely life changing.

[Dawnelle Wilkie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing, eclectic, smart, funny, brutal novel from a hugely talented writer. It's experimental and fabulous; like poetry that puts on prose pants and dances around the room. A quick read that makes you jump on-line and order her first book as soon as you finish it.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

just read it tonight; it's astonishing: brutal, hilarious, brutal, wonderful, and so so good. You need it.