Review

Title: Road to Covered Bridge
Author: Marilyn Brown
Publisher: Walnut Springs Press
Genre: Children’s, YA, or adult historical/literary fiction
Year Published: 2018
Number of Pages: 216
Binding: Paper
Price: $16.99

Reviewed by Harlow Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

Years ago Marilyn Brown asked me if I was interested in writing a blurb for her new novel, House on the Sound. I got my MFA at the U of (there is no R in) Warshington, met my wife at a dance in Olympia at the far end of Puget Sound, and had read an anecdote in the Times or P-I about how Boeing camouflaged its buildings during World War II, building miniature villages on top, complete with miniature cows.

I included the anecdote in my blurb, though I think Marilyn cut it. With the war in the background, life on the sound becomes increasingly unsound, and the story more and more dark as the two Callister girls venture into the lovely, dark and deep woods and ravine near their home.

In The Road to Covered Bridge the family, now called McKinsey, moves to Provo, Utah to be with their grandparents, their father staying at his work in the shipyards in Bremerton. The story opens with a playful note as they get off the train and some wind, or air from the train, blows Lindy our narrator’s skirt. I see a reference to a famous moment from a film of the period with a woman walking past a train in Grand Central Station. The whistle blows, air comes out and flutters her dress. But I also see a reference to Marilyn Monroe’s dress being blown by the wind of a passing subway train as she stands on the grate. I note that Marilyn Monroe has the same initials as Marilyn McMeen Brown, and as the grandparents’ grocery store, The M & M.

There’s a density and playfulness in the book that is fun to watch, as in Marilyn’s other novels. She doesn’t belabor the playful moments, treats them with a light touch, but there’s also a dark touch to the novel. The family may be far from the possibility of furious aerial bombardment, but the war is in the background, and I kept thinking of James Hurst’s classic story “The Scarlet Ibis” from my 9th grade English textbook, where the war functions symbolically in the background, intruding symbolically in the same way it does in this novel, in the murder of Mr. Potter’s wife, the possible theft of her body, and other incidents.

There is also a very dark episode in an outhouse, a practical joke, perhaps, from their friend Nancy (no Sluggo?). The best outhouse story I’ve read since Marden Clark’s “Phoebe’s Out.” I grew up hearing stories about tipping over outhouses on Halloween, and stealing apples from an uncle’s prize tree, but when my father wrote them down and put them together in Morgan Triumphs I found an edge of pain to the stories, a man in his mid-sixties looking back on tricks he played on people in their sixties and older.

And yet, the contest with Phoebe to defeat the guide wires and stakes she’s used to secure the outhouse is a contest of equals, or at least Morgan and his friends think they’re equal to the challenge. But in The Road to Covered Bridge, Lindy and Elaine have no resources for dealing with Nancy’s joke or ordeal, and it’s not clear that Nancy understands what she’s doing to them. She’s a complex and ambiguous character.

(I do have to say, though, neither outhouse story is as sad and horrifying as the outhouse scene near the beginning of Richard Wright’s Black Boy/American Hunger.)

But if Nancy represents in some way the darkness and ambiguity of the war in the background, the school lunch lady, America Laughingheart, represents hope and joy for an America that is not laughing.

Now, an attentive reader will notice that I haven’t said much about the plot of the novel, except that it follows a group of children through a school year in wartime, living across the street from a cemetery, and that all these elements figure in the story, but it’s not really a plot-driven novel so much as a portrait of a family, a community, and a country at war. I won’t spoil your delight in seeing how all these elements come together, including a wonderful Christmas pageant with papier mache puppets.

Then too, the novel raises questions for me that are more important than plot but very much related to plot. Marilyn has told me she wants to be a popular writer–a fraught term. Does she mean popular in the way Brinton Turkle meant dirty when he told a BYU audience, “I want to be known as a writer of dirty books,” made dirty by countless children’s hands reading them, or does she mean popular in the sense of having a large and growing audience over time, like Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, or Flannery O’Connor, or does she mean fast-paced popular novels like Sue Grafton’s or J. A. Jance’s?

I had a home-teaching companion in Seattle who had signed copies of all Jance’s books, and the Times or PI said she designed her chapters to be read in the time it took a bus to go from Seattle across Lake Washington to Bellevue. Marilyn’s pacing is more leisurely, not designed for a quick commute (not mine at least). Too, the discussion guide at the back suggests she wants to appeal to women in book groups, and the questions focus on symbolism and character, which means she’s not much interested in the kind of action Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone finds herself in, ending up again and again in narrow constricted spaces–though no outhouses in the ones I read.

Marilyn’s pacing is much more like Cather’s or Welty’s. Indeed, I listened to O Pioneers! just before reading The Road to Covered Bridge, and The Song of the Lark while I was reading it, and Marilyn has Cather’s love of passionate characters, oddball incidents and folktales, and unhurried conversation. (I kept thinking of the scene in the cliff dwelling alluded to by the cover art for Song of the Lark.)

During the same Children’s Lit class where Jim Jacobs told us about Brinton Turkle’s remark, Richard Peck came to BYU (as did Gerald McDermott). Peck said the thing that defines something as children’s or young adult fiction is primarily the age of the characters. By that measure, The Road to Covered Bridge is a children’s novel and should appeal to children, but the sentence structure and style are more adult. But as soon as I write that I think, “Oh come on, you read To Kill a Mockingbird in grade school.” (I will note that a certain blurb writer for Marilyn Brown’s forthcoming The Black Canary ended the blurb with, “If it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, how about a black canary?”)

Too, I remember one of the children in Adrien Stoutenburg’s eco-apocalypse novel Out There, who wanted to read philosophy so he got himself a dictionary to look up all the hard words, and started reading. (Stoutenburg has a local connection as she published Greenwich Mean Time with the U of U Press.)

Now you may think I’m about to say Marilyn’s style is so eclectic–blending historical fiction, mystery/thriller, romance, elementary school stories and other genres–that it won’t satisfy the fans of any of those genres. Rather, the novel suggests that the lives of an ordinary family in a small town in a nation at war have all the elements we associate with popular genres and with literary fiction.

Because we hear about terrible things like murder and death and physical and sexual abuse from a child who doesn’t wholly understand what she’s telling us, and isn’t scathed by them, we can look at her world with the same hope she does, including a wonderful scene involving a messy diaper and a peanut butter sandwich.

Toward the end, Mr. Potter, whose wife was murdered, and Lindy, our narrator, go up the canyon to Covered Bridge to visit America Laughingheart, who has been snowed in. She shows them the family history she’s been working on. Part of the subtitle says, “Being the history of Claire Summervale, who became the captive squaw of Adelo Palahuni, meaning Laughingwater.” She explains, “I changed it to heart,” and in a lot of ways she is the heart of the novel, giving heart to the people around her, heart and nurture.

This is a rich and interesting novel, worth more words than I have space to say, so I’ll end with an anecdote. In the author’s note Marilyn says she changed the date of the Thistle flood (and there’s a beautiful passage where Lindy imagines the things at Covered Bridge now covered by all that water that backed up when a rain-saturated slope sloughed off the mountain and dammed up the Spanish Fork River, inundating the tiny railroad-stop town of Thistle). I remember that flood, so it’s interesting to see it moved from my college years to Marilyn’s childhood. But what’s 40 years between friends? I wonder if she didn’t also change the name of Thistle to Covered Bridge because she couldn’t resist the idea of having the covered bridge truly covered.

There is a place in south Utah County, south of the Spanish Fork River, called Covered Bridge, and a day or two after I finished reading, I got a Daily Herald Breaking News email with the headline, “Elk Ridge, Woodland Hills, Covered Bridge area under mandatory evacuation order as Pole Creek fire moves closer.” From the other end of the valley I could see the smoke pouring off Mount Nebo, so pulled out my phone and took a picture through the bus window.

The Road to Covered Bridge will be welcomed by readers who want to learn more about the family in Christmas at the M & M, and deserves to be welcomed by readers who want to understand life in wartime as reflected in a small town far from the front.