Water from the Well

From Publishers Weekly
Boston-based writer McLarey proves that you can go home again in this lyrical first novel set in her native southwest Arkansas. Segueing back and forth in time from 1905 to 1972, she uses brief episodes to illuminate the multifarious incidents that form the web of local history: a baseball game between black and white men; a tornado that destroys some homes and lives while capriciously sparing others; a sheriff's passion for a woman with flaming hair; an old black woman's revenge for the rape of her great-granddaughter; a Maine woman who travels to Sugars Spring to make good on her grandfather's Civil War promise. With their often double first names, the welter of characters who people the side-by-side and inextricably intertwined rural communities of Sugars Spring (white) and Bethel ("colored") are at first as hard to untangle as those in a Russian novel. But the repetitious singsong descriptions help to keep everyone sorted out, as well as give the narrative the incantatory cadence of an oft-recited epic: "David Ben Sugars, as on so many nights lately, left home shortly after supper, left at the beginning of the pink and lonely time of the evening, left in the new Model A his folks had bought for him. ..." A fine read for those who enjoy being immersed in a rich torrent of language. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Elements of tall tales, Southern humor, and biblical extracts permeate this first novel. McLarey keeps readers attuned to their senses by detailing the color, scents, and sounds of her setting: the white community of Sugar Springs in southwestern Arkansas and the neighboring Chickenham, or Bethel to its neighboring black residents. In this episodic work, a baseball game pitting blacks against whites ends with a legendary swing of the bat, and a cyclone, "black and green and spiteful," leaves one woman hanging by her hair in a tree. Throughout, readers must contend with a multitude of voices from the likes of Rebekah Sarah, who sees the future with her green eye, and Cora Emery, the displaced Yankee resident. Tragic consequences, many based on racial hatred, do develop. But McLarey doesn't dwell on the hatred so much as she pays homage to the communities that survive despite it. For most fiction collections.?Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, EugeneCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
McLarey's new novel is a tour de force, a seamless patchwork of interracial relationships, family histories, overlapping lives, and community relations. Life in the South from the 1920s to 1970s for both blacks and whites is depicted with sharp detail, wit, grace, and subtle insight. McLarey's style is certainly influenced by such writers as Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty. Yet McLarey's language has its own particular rhythms and fluidity. Some passages are simply breathtaking in their poetic and musical movement. The characters are real and complex, exuding deep sadness, determination, faith, and easy pleasure. The sexy and sassy tone of the book also works to McLarey's favor. By interweaving all these stories, McLarey has stitched a literary, many-colored quilt of tragic and redemptive human lives. Janet St. John


Book Description
Acclaimed by The Boston Book Review as "incantatory . . . poetic and magical," Water from the Well is a novel forged in the soul of community. Set in rural Arkansas, it opens in 1919 with a cow-pasture ball game between the whites of Sugars Springs and the coloreds of neighboring Bethel, a game that shakes the town's delicate racial balance. One year later, a cyclone visits destruction on black and white, female and male, villain and victim. Rich with image and sparkling with humor and compassion, Water from the Well is a story of ex-slaves, displaced Yankees, rapists, healers, small-town sheriffs led into temptation, and the rich weave of a century of community history. "Boldly idiosyncratic and folksy . . . characters and their stories emerge with the intimacy of personal memory." -- Richard Bausch New York Times Book Review; "Entertaining, touching, celebratory, and absolutely pitch-perfect." -- Sandra Scofield Philadelphia Inquirer.


From the Inside Flap
Myra McLarey's stunning debut novel takes us into the overlapping, complicitous worlds of black and white, the strange, tangled tales that make up history and the soul of community, and the blessedness of life that lies beyond tragedy. Recalling the authentic cadences and gentle authority of Eudora Welty and the circular, magic storytelling of Toni Morrison, Water from the Well is a sensuous and compelling work of lasting literature. Set in the leafy, agrarian environs of southwestern Arkansas, the novel opens in 1919 with a cow-pasture baseball game between the Sugars Spring men's team and the coloreds of Bethel, an unheard-of event whose outcome disturbs the delicate racial and sexual balance of the community. A year to the day later a cyclone descends, its dark, destructive power visiting black and white alike. Tossing houses, uprooting rosebushes, and mingling lives, the storm becomes analogous to the swirling, evening-time porch stories that give substance to a world as fully realized as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce's Dublin. Spanning over a century of history as rich as the Delta's many-hued soil, and in language vivid with image, humor, idiom, and suggestion, the intertwined stories of the novel have a brilliant dramatic and moral inevitability: the secret rape of a young black woman named Baby and the even more secret murder of her rapist; the abiding rage of former slave Ransom Tramble; the displacement of the Yankee woman Cora Emery McRae; the passions of Sheriff David Ben Sugars; the magical power of the beautiful Delie Turner; the mystical, green-eyed vision of Delie's grandmother, Rebekah Sarah; and the strength, anguish, desire, courage and mystery of Samuel Daniel McElroy, the grandson of slaves. Powerful, transporting, filled with color, light, and character, Myra McLarey's consummately rendered novel speaks to us eloquently about a time and a place that are all but lost. In her accomplished hands the voices from that world come alive again to tell us what we still need to know about America, and about ourselves. Myra McLarey, a native of southwestern Arkansas, is an associate faculty member of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.


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In Water from the Well, the chaotic is returned to again and again as a source of revelation, a truth at once inexplicable and resonant with meaning...Poetic and magical. -- The Boston Book Review


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