Lark and Termite

The focus of Phillips’s first novel in nearly a decade—the vanished Lola—never even makes an appearance. The wife, mother and sister looms over her kin in the West Virginia river town of Winfield. Her sister Nonie raises Lola’s daughter Lark as her own, and in turn, Lark tends to Termite, her hydrocephalic half brother. A disabled boy who experiences the world through sounds, Termite clings to a preternatural connection to his father, Leavitt, a Korean War soldier.

Though most of the complex web of Lola’s relations unfurls over the course of a single week in late July 1959, Phillips takes us to Leavitt in 1950, leading Korean refugees through a railroad tunnel, pining for Lola and their unborn son. Entrapping these lives in such a narrow time frame makes Nonie and Lark’s alternating narrations at first feel like nothing more than a day in the life of a steely restaurant manager burned by love and a doting 17-year-old wary of womanhood. Leavitt’s 1950 death in No Gun Ri and the rising floodwaters of 1959 Winfield seemingly provide the only dramatic action.

But in Phillips’s hands, this becomes the novel’s greatest strength thanks to the beauty of her prose and the specificity of her imagination: “The sky wavers and the river smells of iron where the train bled into its shadow and poured into the water.” This slow and steady immersion into Lark’s world—because it’s ultimately Lark’s story—is so rich with loss and beauty, with characters too complex to be anything less than human, that when the river fills their house, you can’t help but feel water overflow Lark’s boots as though they were your own.

Phillips will read from Lark and Termite Wednesday 11 at Women and Children First.

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