Lyrical Memories in Glenn Taylor’s “The Songs of Betty Baach” https://ift.tt/gZbWE4P
The Songs of Betty Baach by Glenn Taylor offers a dizzying, lyrical journey through the eyes of a woman who stops aging during her seventies and retains her same appearance for nearly three hundred years. It’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which it cleverly winks to) if Randle McMurphy set about liberating generations of families, and you, instead of one asylum. The West Virginia woods where the story is set lends almost as much to the stories as Betty, also known as Everywhen Woman. The hollers provide a primal quality to Taylor’s take on us “human animals.” In this wild place, we can be reminded repeatedly that we fit within a deeper time, a time closer to Betty’s.
While life for Betty never seems to cease, her story is told through short songs. Each is an epoch, complete with a bebop-like coda. Betty’s tunes are intertwined with America’s character-creating historical moments. She’s lived through the Revolution and Civil War. Presently, she is living through Covid and climate change. Taylor takes in the totality of how we got here, not only as individuals but also as a nation and species. By moving the timeline forward, he asks us what we intend to do next. Will we write a widely published manifesto creating a collective resistance? And if that fails, will we wall ourselves off in a compound? Make no mistake. This is no allegory. This is a call to arms. Betty entrusts us with her songs because “I am not a robot and neither are you.” She may leave it up to us to create the next song for humanity, but for our Betty’s sake, please don’t sell out. I call her ‘our Betty’ because she acts in the world as I’d hope a grandmother who has seen the worst of humanity would: a tireless defender and unfathomably deep lover.
That is the most surprising part of this book. When many writers tackle immorality they create bored, calloused characters. In The Songs, we get to follow a person whose love only deepens as she moves through the centuries. As her love grows, so does her indignancy. I can feel her rage as she righteously combats racism, sexism, and overall intolerance. It is so gratifying to see a female character written to embody strength, compassion, anger, and regret so seamlessly. Betty is also really, really funny. The fact she is a grandmother makes this all the more satisfying. But Betty doesn’t want to be part of the trouble she sees throughout her several lifetimes. She is trying to change her own penchant for violence just like the dog that works for the hunters of those who were enslaved and seeking freedom (“Dogs will change if you love them hard enough”). And if I were set adrift through time to watch the pain and oppression of those I love, I’m sure you wouldn’t fault me for partaking in “bone-hollowing” moonshine and some “buckwheat” a la Betty.
In between Betty’s lives, families, mushroom trips, and anthropomorphism, there is cadence. But sometimes that cadence falls a bit out of rhythm. Taylor’s arc is wrought with beauty, feeling, and lyricism that left me staring at the wall in appreciation between paragraphs. But some of the imagery and concepts would fit better in the stanza of a poem or a stream-of-consciousness journal. The Songs reads like a legend, complete with tricksters and animal helpers. Like those tales, there is a mysticism thrumming through the songs. Its transcendentalism takes us through form, time, and space, but didn’t always take me with it. I needed something more to string it all together into a melody.
But this should not discourage you from picking up this book. In fact, if you don’t do anything else today, you must read Betty’s “Song of Memory.” I read the first paragraph to a friend just so I could hear it out loud. Betty acknowledges the fickle nature of memory with the same practical empathy she does with everything else. After all, “remembering is merciful work.” Yet, she doesn’t flinch when recounting how our memories can be co-opted: “I know one thing for certain: History, like they teach us in school, wasn’t never the real story.” For days I was left thinking about what good memory is and how I am using my own. These are the types of questions Betty, and her songs, created for me. Which is to say, this book was very successful in having me consider how I’d treat a life that doesn’t end and doesn’t exclude any of the joy, pain, or love. Maybe if I get a better handle on this, I could tell Betty “…at last, we will have begun.”
FICTION The Songs of Betty Baach
By Glenn Taylor
University of Massachusetts Press
Published March 31, 2023
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