Book Review: Feather Man by Rhyll McMaster

Feather Man
author: Rhyll McMaster
Marion Boyars Publishers
release date: September 2008
isbn:978-0-7145-3148-9
msrp: $15.95

Children who have been subjected to sustained periods of emotional and physical abuse often express themselves in ways that are frustrating for the adults who are trying to help them. They tend to communicate in elliptical loops that disclose events and states of being in oblique or fragmented terms. Having worked as a counselor for programs for such children, I can attest that one of the most important things I was supposed to observe and record in my clinical charting was anything that resembled disclosure. Those small pieces of information, those miniscule chinks that allowed us to see who they were really feeling, were treated like missing chips from the Rosetta Stone. Every one a small step towards reaching and healing that child.

Reading the first part of Rhyll McMaster's "Feather Man" was a bit like dealing with one of those children. The narrator, who is only known as "Sooky" in the first part of the book is a cypher. She seems to circle close to expressing some real feeling, but with the exception of a single outing with three sisters, these events almost always coincide with an incident involving emotional or physical pain. Even those events are fragmented and often obfuscated by what feels like someone fleeing from the truth of her feelings and experiences. By the end of the section I felt that I knew of Sooky, but really didn't know her. She was a child at a distance, occasionally heard and seen and then swallowed up in the lives of the adults around her.

By the second section, betrayals and teenhood have driven her to expand her world. In some ways, she seems to be trying to create a simulacra of typical teen life rather than actually experiencing it. A large part of this is due to the damage she feels from being abused, emotionally locked out and abandoned. In spite of the very normal youthful life that is going on around her, hers is a sterile, grim outlook. This continues almost unchanged through her adulthood and first abusive marriage into a convergence of events that brings everything together in a way that causes karmic debts to be paid and a better life and marriage beyond.

Some of the promotional material I have read regarding this book has compared it to Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird". I have to disagree. Lee's Scout is a girl who is loved and protected. The world intrudes on her innocence and lack of experience but there is still the loving buffer of Atticus and Gem as well as a number of adults who seem to take to heart the idea that it takes a village or at least a small southern town to raise a child. McMaster's Sooky is completely unprotected and underloved. At worst, she is used or treated as an inconvenience, at best, she is treated as a poppet for amusement.

The profound differences between Lee and McMaster don't end there. Lee's novel is often spare in it's description. the narrative is often driven by what is said, in keeping with the tradition of oral history as a storytelling model in Southern US literature, there is much to be made of the plentiful dialogue. McMaster's novel is far more internal in it's depiction of interaction between the characters. The language is a dense thicket of description of a middle class home as represented by the minutia described by a child. This takes up so much of the larger part of Sooky's recounting of her life. It makes the story hard going alternately because at times it seems to read like a laundry list and at other times, the emotionally damaged, locked down responses of the character make it feel relentlessly grim. Honestly I would come closer to comparing this novel to Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" than the piece chosen by the publisher.

Having written that, let me say that I enjoyed "As I lay Dying" and am all for a good, challenging read. Some of the sections of "Feather Man" are quite good and offer the delights that one would find in such a book. However, most of it is so overwritten that I would find it hard going to recommend it.
__________________________