Status Updates From The Third Life of Grange Co...

the relationship with Ruth and Grange is slightly warped but beautiful. “A little love and a little buckshot”. I DESPISE Brownfield, let out of jail seven years after blowing his wife’s face off with a shotgun. Josie spreading rumors that the grandfather / granddaughter relationship is mysteriously unwholesome. I am sick with not knowing how this is going to turn out.

what the hell

in the most blunt caricature of a white New Yorker in what was probably the roaring twenties, Walker has a young pregnant woman prefer drowning to death in a freezing pond to being rescued by an apparently homeless black man, after he had built up sympathy for her after watching her be spurned by her presumably already married lover.

the whole arc of Brownfield getting cowed by his wife beating him with the gun and threatening to shoot his balls off to force him into accepting a move from the shack to the town and then him planning to screw them out of their far more leisurely town life to go back to sharecroppers by keeping her so pregnant she got ill is just soul-crushing.

this book is absolutely brutal. Brownfield ends up in the exact same tread of his father, falling in love with the same woman, cheating on his wife with the same woman, drinking away all their money and beating and belittling Mem when she had once been a happy, educated schoolteacher into a thin, hollow shell of a human being. Grange finally comes back, and he desires atonement, but the hurt is impossibly deep.

The picture of Brownfield’s (and Grange’s) life is depressing. The generational trauma of the crippling indebtedness passed down to the son and poisoning the mother’s psyche is enormous, without relief. It’s such a stark contrast once Brownfield leaves the stunted shack of his parents’ spiritual death and begins to see life outside of the debt machine.