Many bestselling American novels are comfortable reads. They offer central characters who are attractive and admirable. They provide a story that carries the reader along and leaves the reader with a good feeling at the end.
They don’t cause trouble. They aren’t out to challenge the reader with new ideas, except for perhaps providing some relatable insights into an obscure world or topic. They avoid ambiguity since it’s always unsettling to have to cope with the ambiguous.
Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 novel by Delia Owens that has sold more than four million copies, is a recent example.
Set in 1970 and earlier, it is the story of the ultimate outsider, a girl named Kya — Catherine Danielle Clark — growing up, totally isolated, in a marsh along the North Carolina shore. At the age of six, she is abandoned by her mother and then by her brother, the last of her four siblings, and, by the age of ten, is totally alone when her abusive father disappears.
Nonetheless, against all odds, she fends for herself, finds a way to get food and a way to make a tiny bit of money and becomes an expert on the birds, grasses and other natural elements of her world. She is portrayed as a triumphant creation of her own self.
All the while, the people of the nearby town of Barkley Cove treat her as a pariah, not just as swamp trash, their term for the poor people who live in the marsh, but as someone not-quite-human, the Marsh Girl, or Wolf Girl. She’s living a life that’s a great deal foreign to theirs, and that scares them.
Uriah Heep and Kya
Outcasts in literature can be very disturbing. Think of Uriah Heep, the cloying, insincere sycophant in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Other characters in the novel cringe at his touch, and the reader finds him distressing because he’s doing dastardly stuff that will mess up others’ lives.
Even so, he is such an over-the-top schemer that he’s fascinating for the reader. He is not a cardboard cut-out. Dickens sketches his character with psychological depth, making clear that Heep is not innately evil, that his lust for power and position are rooted in what life has dealt him.
Readers aren’t likely to be distressed by Kya. She is the outcast as hero. She’s plucky and game. She doesn’t complain.
Kya is a character that a reader relates to easily, even though she lives a life far different from the vast majority of those readers. That’s because everyone, at some point in life, at least, has felt like an outcast, has felt that the others just don’t understand. In this way, Kya is the reader, just better perhaps at coping with her outsider status.
Tate, Chase and Emma’s loves
Like the reader, Kya is looking for love. She has two boyfriends, Tate Walker and Chase Andrews. But, when it comes to love, both fall short.
Tate, who teaches her to read and loves learning the secrets of the marsh with her and is gentle and caring, fails to come back from college when he promised, and, feeling so ashamed to have failed her, he stays away for years. It breaks her heart.
Her flirtation with Chase doesn’t end well. And then it gets worse. And then even worse.
Although Tate failed her, he still loves her. He’s a good boyfriend. Chase, on the other hand, is the stereotypical high school quarterback, son of a rich businessman and arrogant ass. He is not only a bad boyfriend. He is bad, bad, bad. Indeed, his death, announced on the book’s first page, becomes more and more pleasurable for the reader to consider as the book goes on because it becomes clear that, well, he deserved it.
There’s no uncertainty here for the reader. Although imperfect, Tate is the one to cheer for. Chase is the one to sneer at.
That’s especially comforting since most of readers have had romantic relationships that were, at a minimum, confusing, a mix of good and bad and routine. A parallel in literature is Jane Austen’s Emma in which the title character is completely confused about who she loves — and so, for much of that novel, is the reader.
With Where the Crawdads Sing and Kya’s love life, readers don’t have to work hard to know what to feel.
Kya’s attractions
Kya is designed in other ways to be an attractive hero and stand-in for the reader. There is a #MeToo aspect to the story of her young adulthood which, as the nation is learning, resonates with many female readers.
And, while she is rejected by the white townspeople, the African-Americans of the area, similar outcasts, treat her like a princess.
They also talk in dialect, unlike everyone else in the book. For instance, Kya’s friend/father figure Jumpin’ says in response to a question about visiting grandchildren, “Yessiree, got fou’ wif us right now.”
That’s a throwback to the cliché of the happy Mammy in Gone with the Wind and generations of other novels about slavery by white writers, a stereotype that is identified today as racist, especially when whites aren’t given the same treatment.
Superwoman
The most attractive thing about Kya, though, is that she is a superwoman.
She survives essentially alone from the age of six in an environment filled with threats and mysteries, a place where a small, lone child would be in constant danger of death from disease or drowning or a festering injury or a ravaging animal, a place where a small, lone child would be constantly lonely and at risk of debilitating depression or another crippling mental illness.
And she doesn’t just survive, she thrives.
Never schooled about words and reading, the 14-year-old Kya gobbles up the lessons she gets from Tate and is soon working through advance texts, including Einstein’s books.
And not only that, but she is a born naturalist who keeps voluminous and meticulous collections of feathers and other marsh articles, and a born artist who sketches and paints the animals and the plants she has come to know in this wetland.
And not only that, but, with a slight nudge from Tate, she is able to take her art and combine it with her knowledge and her writing to put together manuscripts for a constant stream of highly successful and profitable books about the marsh environment.
She is a paragon of success, a woman of superior knowledge and skills and craft.
And not only that, but, despite all her accomplishments, she is still unfairly seen as the half-human Marsh Girl who must undergo a trial for the murder of Chase Andrews.
Fatal flaw
In literature, such hugely successful people often have a fatal flaw, such as Achilles with his vulnerable heel in The Iliad and Othello with his rage in Shakespeare’s play and Samson with his love for Delilah in the Bible.
Kya has no fatal flaw.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is designed so that readers will fall in love with Kya, a hero of great stature who does everything right, even down to the surprises on the last two pages.
It is a bestseller. It is a comfortable read.
Patrick T. Reardon
12.22.20
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.
I enjoyed the book tremendously. It evokes comparisons to Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides…an alcoholic, abusive, bullying father disenfranchised by fortune due to the depression and war; siblings who either escaped or clung to the ineradicable beauty and mysteries of the Atlantic shore, a mother who either fought or escaped the brutishness of the male domination of the economy derived from the outer banks. The difference between Kya and Savannah Wingo is mental strength. Both were poets, both wrote of the influence on their souls of the marshes. Kya was tougher. Where I question the credibility of the plot is the complete abandonment by the town’s gov’t entities of a child. The gossip was rife, so they knew she existed. I can’t believe she didn’t go mad with lobeliness, rejection and isolation…except for occasional forays into town for food and exchanges with Jumpin’ and his wife. I also didn’t get enough
of a grip on her psychic state, not from the narrative revelation but from interior monologue. Too much happens to a girl in her adolescence to sweep much of it away as marginal. Her father? Come on…he had to wonder how she was. Her mother’s family? Nobody went to claim this child? An incredible tale, but despite its popularity and readers’ willingess to suspend disbelief, it has some narrative flaws. I give it 4 stars, not five.
I agree with you, Jeanne, about the flaws. My reaction, though, is that they ruin the novel because they turn Kya into a superwoman, no longer a human being of limitations and connections.
As a writer, my concern is that too much was left to surface description/narrative and as a 1st-time novelist Owens may have missed opportunities to explore the psyche of this girl and the psyche of the townsfolk. She could’ve explored Kya more from another girl’s point of view, or Tate’s father talking to him about her fitting into his plans to soften the dibg to his character in dumping her. Perhaps her poetry was a prop to do so. I m not sure how the Superwoman thing comes into play here…I was confused by your response to my take on the novel. She is vulnerable, therefore flawed, and she turns to nature to guide her behavior about Chase, which is no flaw. The praying mantis ate her mate just because. Kya killed Chase for survival reasons, which does elevate her above the mantis, but still the female ain’t gonna be no victim in Kya ‘s book. That we are debating the book is tribute to how good the novel is, so Owens did her job. Thanks for your thoughtful review.