Q Road

Basic writing courses will tell you that a novel can have a strong plot, strong characters, or both. While the latter is the ideal, many novels get by just fine with one or the other – a complex and intriguing plot can drive a book even if the characters are cardboard, and a soft plotline can be excused if the characters are terribly compelling. But when both are lacking, the resulting story is generally a waste of paper.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, “Q Road” attempts to be a character-driven novel. Set in rural Kalamazoo county in present day, the reader is introduced to a farmer with an amputated index finger, an asthmatic boy, a part-Indian wild girl, a neighbor who sees evidence of aliens at every turn, and a smooth-talking window salesman whose wife fantasizes about murdering him with a butcher knife. These people should be much more interesting than they are. As it is, the reader can almost see the painstaking work the author has done to think up oddities and carefully assign one or two per character. But human beings are more than the sum of their quirks.

To her credit, Campbell does have a talent for description and portrays the farmland, woods, and river with more depth. She opens the novel with a picture of wooly caterpillars migrating across a road, an obvious metaphor for the mindless striving toward ultimate transfiguration, but the analogy falls short even though it beautifully sets the scene of a Michigan autumn.

We learn early that “Q Road” stands for Queer Road, but the word is used in the old-fashioned sense, in reference to the eccentric characters that line the rural road, not a euphemism for gay. In the context of modern day lexicography, this seems almost misleading.

George Harland, a middle-aged farmer, has married seventeen-year old Rachel, illegitimate daughter of a hermit woman who succumbed one night to a liaison with a stranger, and who raised her daughter to hunt, trap, and live a barely-legitimate life on a rusted houseboat moored on a riverbank in the woods. Rachel craves land, and George, who owns a large but deteriorating farm, craves her. This is the basis of their marriage, where there is sex but no conversation. Rachel carries a rifle and after nearly killing David, a twelve year old boy with asthma, develops some odd affection for him that means he is one of the few people she will speak to. David, in turn, worships George, dreaming of being adopted by the farmer and working with him every day, fantasizing that hard labor will toughen his lungs and cure his asthma. Because his father is long gone and his mother thinks only of moving to California, with or without her son, David feels the need for a parent that he imagines George would fill splendidly.

Rachel has secrets, but it is difficult to say if her abrasive personality is a result of them or simply because of her unusual upbringing. Her initial sexual experience ends in violence that leads to the first secret, and it seems to tie her to the land even more tightly. When her mother disappears, she seems to care very little about the loss, or wonder at all what has happened to her, but simply persists in being silent and angry.

George has memories, tied to the land, with his grandfather’s stories of lust and jealousy, remembrance of a woman schoolteacher driven away because she slept with a farmhand, and the tornado that came that same night as if in divine punishment. George knows that someday he may have to break up his farm and sell off pieces to housing developers, yet still he persists because he knows nothing else to do.

So Rachel cultivates her Indian garden, grows pumpkins and squash that she sells at her roadside stand, and watches the wooly bear caterpillars migrate across the road. David helps George stack bales of hay in the barn. Steve the window salesman drives around, talking to women with vague lust in his mind and imagination, while his wife Nicole thinks of killing him between plans of building a new home, as if the perfect home is the remedy for an indifferent marriage.

Other characters like Milton, who operates a restaurant that celebrates Jesus and the history of farming, populate the novel but often do little to enhance it. Since the story is minimal, it is hard to judge when progress is being made. Do people change during the events in this book? It is difficult to say, because they are so slippery that the reader cannot grasp them, nor predict what they might or might not have done anyway. For example, a character named April May keeps the secret of a murder, but the reader can’t tell why. Is it related to the fact that she was hurt in the tornado so many years ago? A nail went “clean through” her foot, but this subtle reference to crucifixion, if it is even deliberate, tells us nothing else about her personality.

The blurbs on the novel celebrate the “marvelously rendered details” and “rich imagery” of the book, and Campbell does have a way with a phrase. But a painting of a rural Michigan farm, no matter how beautifully done, no matter what vibrant colors are used, no matter how expensive the canvas and frame, is not a movie, and a book that is primarily description is a classroom exercise, not a novel.

Bottom line: “Q Road” rambles.