Heavy Humidity and a Haunting Bayou in “Girls With Long Shadows” https://ift.tt/rSvgN6d
In her atmospheric debut, Girls with Long Shadows, Tennessee Hill steeps each page with the flawed characters, sinister events, isolated locale, and ramshackle landscaping that make up so many of our favorite southern gothic stories. For fans of Lauren Groff, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Donna Tarte, we’re excited to introduce you to your new favorite author and the fictional town of Longshadow, Texas.
In Girls with Long Shadows, the humidity clings as thick to the air as discontent clings to our three main characters: Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C. The Binderup triplets were born on the day their mother, Murphy, left the world. They are left with Isadora, their grandmother, and affectionately (or, more so, unimaginatively) referred to as the “Manatee’s girls.” Unimaginative because these girls have been looked upon as the same individual, three parts of a whole, since the day they were born. Also unimaginative because the nickname given to their grandmother was born from her habit, or compulsion, to begin each day swimming and swimming and swimming in the bayou that surrounds the derelict golf course the family has run for decades.
Although the town cannot differentiate the triplets, each one, especially at nineteen years old, is different in their own way, and longs to be even more autonomous with each passing day. Our narrator Baby B states, “We shared a truck, a phone, chores, a face, a body, a life, a body, a face. That was how it reeled in my head when I thought of us. I prided myself on the idea that it bothered me the most out of us girls, the sharing, though I knew it destroyed us all, just differently.” Baby A is bold and reckless and is learning how to use her body as a weapon; Baby B is cautious and observant and finds herself caught in the crosshairs of her sisters; and Baby C is intuitive and spiritual and seeks advice from psychics rather than her family.
Still, these sisters share a connection that not everyone is privy to. That is, they can feel what the other is feeling. Baby B and Baby C can sense the intimate touches Baby A receives from her boyfriend. Likewise, Baby A and Baby B can intuit Baby C’s emotions when something feels off to her. This relationship is significant on its own, but developed alongside disturbing and foreshadowing events, we know that all along, no matter what individual direction these sisters are headed, their identities are closely tied. When it ends tragically for one, it’s traumatic for all: “My body was her body was a place she moved and lived forever. Even now she was gone, her face still looked out at the town through me, her voice still shimmered when I opened my mouth. It was a flood on top of a flood.”
And although Hill does a remarkable job bringing these sisters to life and creating deeply effective relationships with their other family members – their aunt Rachel, their grandmother, their brother Gull – it’s the other subtleties and devices that Hill employs that makes Girls with Long Shadows stand out amongst other books of its kind. For instance, in the midst of the drama, trauma, and sisterly intertwining’s, there are breaks throughout the book that offer a Greek chorus-like angle from the Front Porch Chorus, giving the reader a look into the collective perspective of the townspeople who grew up watching these sisters from afar: “From this far, it always seemed as if a many-faced person was jogging through town, sitting outside the Ace, scraping snail shells off the bulkhead with an oyster knife. They’re a blur we never bothered to untangle. They nearly blend with the green of the bayou’s algae, the electric pink of the evening’s sunset. Those girls drag their long shadows behind them like prom dresses and don’t see—can’t, from their vantage—how they fuse together.”
It is from this voyeuristic gaze that the sisters are perpetually suffocated. The dehumanizing quality of being made into the same person over and over, to never be truly known or accepted as an individual, to be treated as though your life was “immersive theater,” these points of view give the reader a look from a different perspective, but also force us to see, yet again, how that suffocating debasement can and does lead to the aftermath these sisters face.
All this is intensified by another praise-worthy device – the personification of the landscape. Longshadow is a make-believe town that feels as solid and viscerally real as the very world we live in. The world Hill creates is thrust upon us like a hot, heavy blanket we cannot escape. The bayou, although a place of peace and leisure for the sisters and their grandmother, is also murky and unpredictable and all-encompassing. It is an identity all unto itself, and is as alluring as it is haunting. Baby B says, “The bayou had a grip about it. I’d felt it before, holding us hostage on our swims. Yet we gave ourselves to it every morning, not fearing enough that it could steal us away.”
To be clear, Girls with Long Shadows is a slow burn. This is not your fast-paced thriller that leaves you on the edge of your seat, nor is it the attention-grabbing contemporary plot that leaves you with as much hope and hilarity as it does heart wrenching scenarios. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In addition to addressing unseen women and their place in the world, this is a book that immerses you in what feels like a different time entirely. Hill’s prose makes everything feel sepia-toned and otherworldly. All in all, this is a book to sink slowly into and wade through its depths, just as one would with the warm bayou.
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