Vanessa's Reviews > Little Altars Everywhere

I almost want to say there is something Proustian about this novel except while I don't fear intellectual eye-rolling over my calling a popular novel written by and about southern women Proustian, I do fear eye-rolling over not quite correct use of the word. What I mean, then, is reading this novel was a gorgeously vivid sensory experience. When the Walker kids went to swim in the pond, I saw and felt and smelled it like I was in that same summertime water. I felt the cool concrete floors of the grocery store beneath my 10 year old feet. I experienced the vertiginous but exhilarating displacement of wandering through the house of a dimly known adult my parents were visiting looking for food, places to play, and random objects to pick up and examine all the while wondering, "Am I allowed to be in this room?"

All of this sensory overload sits on the surface of this loose collection of stories about the Walker clan of Thornton, Louisiana (a prequel of sorts to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood however they can be read in any order.) However, as you read you begin to see the darkness below the surface troubling the waters. Siddha is oddly obsessed with religion and suffering. Lulu pulls out her hair and eats it. Baylor has trouble chewing and swallowing his food. Their mother, Vivi, sure drinks a lot and by the first time someone mentions her hands shaking in the morning, you know.

As the story flashes forward midway through from the 60's to the 90's and expands to include the Walker's hired help, the picture grows clearer and darker. And yet even as unlikable as some characters in the book are, you still feel empathy for them even when you can't forgive their behavior. As a case in point, the final story narrated by Vivi, "Looking for My Mules", made me connect and feel sorry for her even when I should have been saying, "Bitch you brought this on yourself." There's a lot of deceptive depth to this kind of writing. And the story is really about much more than just one family's troubles: small town politics, the death of the rural way of life, war, the burden of secrets.

The final chapter belongs to Siddha and is a great way to wrap up the story although I wanted to keep going (too bad the reviews of YaYa's in Bloom are all so negative.) Don't hit the baby. Fine advice, indeed.