Book Review: Minnow by James E. McTeer II

Minnow
A Novel by James E. McTeer II
Hub City Press, May 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1938235115
$24.95 (hardback); 227 pp.
Reviewed by Anca L. Szilágyi

Landscape reigns in Minnow, the fabulist debut novel by James McTeer II. Set in South Carolina Lowcountry, the story follows a small boy, Minnow, on his quest to find medicine for his dying father. A pharmacist sends him to a witch doctor who in turn sends the boy off on an impossible journey. In exchange for Dr. Crow’s medicine, he must penetrate wild marshlands, swamps, and pine jungles in search of the grave of Sorry George—a witch doctor who once cursed fifty-two men with a fatal, grisly fever, and “[e]ach one of them coughed up some bloody thing, like a little thing that might have been alive once.”

Dr. Crow warns Minnow that Sorry George will not want his grave found and that he will send “three things” after him. Minnow encounters wild boars, glowing green orbs outlining a child’s skull, and a plateye—a fiery-eyed beast that lurks in a swamp. It is this thread, Dr. Crow’s fairytale warning, where seams of the narrative feel too exposed and self-aware. Even as a fairytale trope, it creaks a bit in its lack of mystery, breaking the dream of the story, especially when Dr. Crow advises Minnow to face those three challenges head on.

That being noted, the outcomes of Minnow’s journey are surprising and harrowing. The tidy structure of “three” (and we, along with Minnow, are never sure which of the dangers he faces were part of the triad) breaks open with the arrival of a natural catastrophe. A hurricane and flood barrels through the islands; in the aftermath, Minnow finds a moaning man buried neck deep in mud, one arm and shoulder thrusting out. His head is bashed in on one side, his wound filled with mud. Minnow tries to pull the man out but, because of the man’s strength and utter panic, Minnow is soon pulled dangerously in:

He balled his fist and landed a blow against the man’s mud-caked ear, right under the gaping wound. The grip released, and Minnow exploded backward [….] The man gurgled something through his mud-filled mouth.

Minnow’s act is astonishing, but he escapes to save his own life. That act naturally elicits the question: what you would do in such a situation? Bodies are strewn throughout the landscape. The image of them drowned and drowning, mouths full of mud, remains long after finishing the novel.

The nexus of place, feeling, and history is profound in Minnow. The story is steeped in the folklore of Gullah culture—that of descendents of slaves who worked on coastal rice plantations. Sorry George is the great-grandson of a witch doctor who came over as a slave on a Spanish ship. And the plateye—that fiery beast bellowing in the swamp—is, according to the folklore, a spirit not properly buried.

McTeer’s prose shines especially when he guides us deep into the Lowcountry, where “the trunks leaked sap like orange blood, and the air smelled like sweet peppermint pine” and “garfish the size of hogs surfaced in the shadows and sucked at the surface for algae and brine.” The landscape is eerie, beautiful, treacherous, and ripe with unsettling magic.

Sorry George’s grave is hidden in a remote former plantation where African-Americans continue to live and work, both in the great house and in the former slave quarters. It is here that a natural disaster wreaks havoc to horrifying proportions and upends whatever we could have predicted for Minnow’s quest. Minnow’s hometown is not unscathed, though its higher ground grants its mostly white inhabitants somewhat less devastation. Set near the turn of the 20th century, shooting roots deep into American history, Minnow brings to mind wounds still fresh from the more recent and devastating past, wounds not even ten years old.

Anca L. Szilágyi is a Brooklynite living in Seattle. Her fiction appears in Gastronomica, Fairy Tale Review, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction appears on the Ploughshares blog. She was awarded an inaugural Made at Hugo House fellowship, a 2015 Jack Straw fellowship and grants from 4Culture and the Vermont Studio Center. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the “fresh new faces in Seattle fiction.”