Bitter Milk.

BITTER MILK

BY JOHN MCMANUS

NEW YORK: PICADOR, 208 PAGES, $13.

In his two collections, Stop Breakin Down (2000) and Born on a Train (2003), John McManus writes visceral prose that explodes within the tight boundaries of the short story. These narratives possess a graceful internal logic and feature a wide range of gritty characters rebelling against an indifferent and often brutal world. McManus's first novel, Bitter Milk, features similar writing, effortlessly sweeping the reader into the story with its highly detailed and captivating characters.

Bitter Milk focuses on Loren Garland, a nine-year-old boy who suffers from obesity, heart problems, and other ailments. Living on a deteriorating family parcel in the shadow of Chilhowee Mountain in Blount County, Tennessee, Loren is fatherless. His mother, who binds her breasts and wears men's clothing, warns him that "the world is treacherous," disclosing, as she does, a gruesomely detailed dream of their death together by drowning. Not surprisingly Loren is obsessed with death--by cancer, heart attack, bombs, or "murderers who came out past sunset"--and is not unaware of his mother's effect; everything she "had ever done to help him feel safe had only made him more afraid ... It scared Loren to sense Mother's tension. She hated to be near people, in a body like hers." Nevertheless, the boy is fiercely protective of his mother, and when she disappears, early in the novel, Loren embarks on a journey beyond the confines of his familiar world and begins to develop an identity of his own.

McManus's intricate passages of dialogue and sympathetic narration make for compelling reading. In one instance, Loren spends a day wandering with his cousin Eli, a beautiful, tough boy with a slender back and a wild honesty, whom Loren admires because he "could walk shirtless across open fields without shame." In contrast to such passages, which portray the tender interiority of Loren's life, the narrator, Luther, intrudes only occasionally into the text and thus remains somewhat extraneous to the story. Luther claims to be at odds with Loren's mother, hovering quite literally above Loren and fighting for his independence. Though the conceit is interesting, it is difficult to decipher exactly who Luther is (an imaginary friend or the ghost of a dead twin?), a mystery that does not advance the narrative in any meaningful way. Moreover, Luther's voice serves to reiterate to the reader what is already apparent. It's as if McManus felt he had to enhance an already compelling plot with additional analysis in order to make the novel complete. Nevertheless, he continues to deliver original storytelling. Bitter Milk evokes a group of characters who are self-aware but unable to change, and in a vision both disturbing and memorable, the murky depths of the Garland family reflect the malaise and mystery of the land.