The Meat and Spirit Plan

by Selah Saterstrom

Overview

“Like an experimentally inclined Annie Proulx, Saterstrom tersely renders the effects of social violence on individual lives . . . the effect is shattering and transcendent.”—Modern Times Bookstore newsletter

In lyric, diamond-cut prose, Selah Saterstrom revisits the mythic, dead-end Southern town of Beau Repose. This time, the story follows a strung-out American teenager influenced by heavy metal, inspired by Ginger Rogers, hell-bent on self-destruction, and more intelligent than anyone around her realizes. She is forced into rehab and private school, and her life, at least on the surface, changes course, eventually leading to theology studies in Scotland. But as the feverish St. Vitus’s dance of her adolescence morphs into slow-motion inertia abroad, an illness brings her home again—to face the legacy of pain she left behind and to find a way to become the lead in a dance of her own creation.

An heir to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Saterstrom soars above the traditional boundaries of the American novel with “exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language” (Raleigh News & Observer) that makes her novels “impossible to put down.” Spare, raw, and transcendent, Saterstrom’s unflinching examination of modern-day Dixie and contemporary adolescence lights up the dark corners of the American experience.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Pink Institution, a debut novel praised across the country for “letting gusts of fresh, tart air blow into the old halls of Southern Gothic” (The Believer). A Mississippi native, she is currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program. Visit her website at www.selahsaterstrom.com.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566892018
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	09/01/2007
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution, all published by Coffee House Press. Widely published and anthologized, she also curates Madame Harriette Presents, an occasional series. She teaches and lectures across the United States and is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Editorial Reviews

A fragmented novel that lurches through the life of the unnamed narrator from girlhood through adolescence to rocky young adulthood. Early on we sense the narrator's desperation to construct a meaningful life, but contemporary culture-especially in the Southern backwater of Beau Repose-gives her almost nothing to work with. She grows up (if that's the term) in a world with no periphery, where amidst the questionable "pleasures" of drugs and adolescent sex (the mysterious "world of doing it"), she drifts from one empty experience to another. She ends up in reform school, which enforces mandatory activities like basket weaving and square dancing. Eventually, her sharp mind enables her to go to college, and she makes high scores on a placement test for British universities, which leads her to study in Glasgow, city of rain and fog (and more drugs and sex). Her course of study is "The Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretative Uses," in which students create "postmodern happenings in honor of Jacques Derrida," but this intellectualism also understandably fails to nourish the narrator, who becomes ill in both body and mind, the "meat and spirit plan" showing definite deficiencies. At the end of the novel, she insightfully realizes that there's a third choice beyond light and darkness, one that "includes light and dark but is not limited to either." The novel is divided into paragraphs, though Saterstrom orders these paragraphs into a loose narrative framework organized by fragments from heavy-metal bands like Metallica, Anthrax and Judas Priest ("Rock Hard, Ride Free"). Perhaps an even more basic unit of structural organization found here is the image, for image patterns (of GingerRogers, of butchering, of The Seventh Seal, of The Blue Lagoon) weave through both the reality and the dreams of the narrator. The narrator observes that one of the characters "uses language like an exacto blade"-the same can be said of Saterstrom (The Pink Institution, 2004).

Kirkus Reviews