Appalachian Spring: "Marilou is Everywhere" by Sarah Elaine Smith

"Marilou is Everywhere" 

by Sarah Elaine Smith

A Review

Let’s start at the very beginning which, I am told, is a very good place to start.  There’s no Marilou in this novel. “Marilou” is, in fact, the nickname of Jude Vanderjohn, a teenager of colour who lives with her eccentric, alcoholic and possibly sick mother Bernadette in a predominantly white, rural outpost in Appalachia. Also, Marilou isn’t “everywhere”.  She is nowhere… or, rather, nowhere to be found.  At the heart of the novel is the mystery of Jude’s disappearance following a camping trip gone wrong.   

The story is narrated by Cindy Stoat, the younger sister of Jude’s ex-boyfriend Virgil.    Cindy is herself an outcast, raised by a single mother who comes and goes and has now, apparently, left for good, ostensibly “for work reasons”.  Left to her own devices with two older brothers, and taking advantage of Bernadette’s confused state of mind, she steps into the shoes of the missing teenager and slowly morphs in a new composite version of Cindy/Jude.

Over the past months I reviewed two other “missing person” novels:  Felicity McLean's bittersweet coming-of-age story  The Van Apfel Girls are Gone and Francine Toon's (forthcoming) supernatural debut Pine.  Indeed, the “missing person trope” has become a genre unto itself, cutting across other longer-establish genres, from plot-driven page-turning thrillers to subtler, philosophical works. Marilou is Everywhere is the debut novel of poet Sarah Elaine Smith, and hers is a decidedly “literary” approach (not my favourite adjective, but I’ll go for that as a working description).  The novel’s language is rich and musical and even when it is portraying the numbing boredom of small-town life, it does so in pregnant metaphors.    And this is certainly one of this work’s strengths.  Yet, depending on your point of view, it might also be its main weakness.  Cindy is supposed to be a school drop-out and, despite the fact that her days with Bernadette have taught her about Tintoretto, soy sauce and Nina Simone (unexpectedly turning her into the “family intellectual”), her narrative voice still sounds suspiciously like that of a poet-turned-novelist rather than a disturbed teenager.     

This novel should also come with a warning that it is a real downer.   Both Jude and Cindy are, ultimately, outsiders desperate to escape their background, their families and even their bodies.   And this does not make for jolly reading.    But even pain can be beautifully conveyed, and Smith manages to do this brilliantly.  Isn’t great literature often uncomfortable after all?

Kindle Edition, 218 pages

Published October 3rd 2019 by Penguin (first published July 30th 2019)