The Meat and Spirit Plan

Both lyric and visceral, Saterstrom’s coming-of-age novel is narrated by a Southern girl hemmed in by her heroin-addicted mother and motionless surroundings. The book begins with the nameless narrator declaring, “Listen, I am in love. My sister lost her virginity to Anthony Amara when she was fourteen and I plan on doing the same.”

From there, the narrator embarks on what could be described as a sketchy future with men. She drunkenly loses her virginity to a football player; she awakes naked in her bed to find a boy rubbing her breasts; she pretends to be a virgin to attract an older man. She suffers a miscarriage, ekes through reform school, ends up in an unnamed city college and eventually, somehow, makes it to Glasgow to continue school. When her mother dies, she returns home and develops a relationship with a guy named Ian at the same time she develops gallstones, which send her to the hospital for a prolonged stay. There, a night nurse named Charley treats her, for the first time, gently, and she begins to affect a normal life, even while confined to a hospital bed.

Saterstrom writes with both a poet’s precision (“Jack and I cruise dark streets of the last good neighborhood bordering campus looking for deep shadows”) and penchant for opacity (“Eventually, reckon: Dead people, God, and furniture I know you see”). Her energy rockets the reader through the narrator’s young life; she takes great leaps in time and often hacks out large chunks of the time line to focus on the minutiae of a day or week. Occasionally pieces fall by the wayside that we’d like to see included, like the narrator’s sudden school success.

But if there’s a weakness here, it’s in the barbaric nature of nearly all of Saterstrom’s male characters: drunks, misogynists, sadists. Of course, Charley doesn’t fit the bill, one of the only men in the book who isn’t an abuser. It creates a broad me-vs.-them dynamic in an otherwise nuanced story.

Still, it’s not the sort of thing that can hold back the story. Saterstrom is a powerful writer, and it’s been a long time since we’ve read a novel that propelled us through with so much force.—Jonathan Messinger