PERISH

A Texas family deals with a long history of abuse.

“We give up easy,” says one character to her cousin. “Something killed the fight in us.” That’s an understatement. Watkins’ debut follows four members of a family who reunite in their hometown of Jerusalem, Texas, to say goodbye—or something like it—to their ailing matriarch, Helen Jean, who’s hospitalized and not expected to make it out. There’s Julie B., Helen Jean’s only surviving child, who’s 61 and is “just now figuring [herself] out”; she realizes she’s spent most of her life in denial. Julie B. has two children, each struggling in their own way. Jan is raising her own two kids and dreams of escaping Jerusalem and going to college in Dallas; she’s sustained by her born-again Christianity. Jan’s brother, Alex, is a police officer who’s haunted by nightmares about being raped by his uncle and is dealing with his own shadowy past: “There was something broken in me,” he reflects. “Something that no one could love.” And then there’s Julie B.’s niece, Lydia, who lives in Dallas and is struggling with marital problems and the loss of three pregnancies. Most of the characters in the novel are survivors of horrific abuse, some of it at the hands of the monstrous Helen Jean, who was herself abused as a child. As the characters come together, they’re forced to reckon with their family’s troubled legacy, and they try, with mixed results, to come to terms with their shared history. This is an incredibly bleak novel, and it comes close to collapsing under the weight of its own melancholy—the characters are as unlucky as any this side of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015). But despite a melodramatic climactic scene, the novel is saved from total oblivion by Watkins’ writing, which is strong, and her gift for realistic dialogue. It’s not a bad novel, but one gets the feeling that Watkins is capable of much more.

Suffocatingly sad.