“Gently Scattered Intentions” by Laurie Parker

Laurie Parker calls herself “Mississippi Writer Laurie Parker”. No way could I not buy and read a book by a woman, who, though I know from our Facebook association, is twenty years younger than I, has lived in about every town I’ve lived in and gone to school where I did, and eaten in cafes where I did, and posts words I grew up with, along with their definitions– “Caddywhompus”, “Thingamajig”. “Finagle”. Every time I saw one of her posts, it was like visiting home.

Soon as I started GENTLY SCATTERED INTENTIONS, I knew I’d found a winner. Gina, the protagonist, is trying to figure out what happened to her high school friend, Lily Ng, a Chinese girl, whose disappearance after her graduation in 1980 from their home in the Mississippi Delta, prompted officials to seek out Gina’s old boyfriend, a charmer from a wealthy family whose memory is impaired by severe alcoholism. As she puts together pieces from the past and grapples with her present, Gina comes to terms with both.

This book is a mystery wrapped up in a book about Gina’s relationships with her old friend and boyfriend and, ultimately, with herself. It’s beautifully written and southern as pecan pie, and I reveled in it. The sentences are long, almost Faulknerian, the descriptions poetic, and the story is deftly woven, so that even distractible me could follow it. I particularly like how the author portrays how complicated and personal the issue of “race” was and is in the South.

Though I usually don’t like obvious literary devices, I like this one: Every first sentence of every chapter, though always in another segment of time from the previous chapter, uses an image from the last sentence of that chapter to segue. Like, if one chapter ends with a ham on the table, the beginning of the next one begins, say, with a woman with legs big as hams. Rather than distract me, this device let me know I was in another time period, and I looked forward to seeing how each chapter would start.

The ending of GENTLY SCATTERED INTENTIONS was satisfying enough and left me hungry for more of  this author’s writing, a hunger easy to indulge, since she’s written four other novels. I love the way Laurie Parker claims her heritage, how she honors it by being truthful and unsentimental in her portrayal of the South’s rich, complex culture, with story-telling that rocked me, sometimes gently, sometimes with a vigorous “shake”.

When I told Laurie Parker, via FB, that her writing makes me homesick, she replied, with a “heart” and, “If I’ve made you homesick, I’ve done my job.”

Good Job, Mississippi Writer Mississippi Laurie Parker. You and your novels are southern gems.

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