A Pile Up of Lesses/All the Living Review

It seems like a long time ago now that I read C.E. Morgan's All the Living for Chicago Tribune review; I don't believe I've read anything so remarkably undiluted since. It's the story of two lovers, Aloma and Orren, on a Kentucky farm fighting silence and each other. Some aren't going to like Morgan's supremely ascetic vision. I applaud anyone who goes so zealously far with an idea, a sound, a purpose.

Two paragraphs from my review:

... here was a first novel so self-assured and unto itself, so unswerving in its purpose, so strummed through with a peculiar, particular, electrifying sound, that I found myself reading in a state of highest perplexity, and also gratitude and awe. Maybe the gratitude came first, for "All the Living" is a novel about the hardest things—about grief and lonesomeness, about desiring much and staying true, about loving through and forgiveness. It's a novel that makes you think on all of that anew, and that spares nothing and no one in the process.

And:

This is the story, and it's a very good story. But it's the language that gets you. Austere and full of losses. A pileup of lesses: Not just blinkless, but spinless, bookless, riseless, goalless, pitiless, steepleless, driftless, depthless, windowless, questionless, milkless, stormless; there's even a letheless. They might not all have been words before, but they are now, essential to the fabric of a chapterless book whose heroine had "been born into a doublewide of nothing and then spent the better part of her childhood in a school at the sink end of a holler."