east of the yeehaw, west of the voodoo

Review: The Optimist’s Daughter

Eudora Welty’s 1972 novel The Optimist’s Daughter is a simple, well-mannered, earnest Southern story.

The novel spans a week or two in the life of a young Southern woman, Laurel, grappling with the recent loss of her father. It’s loaded with rich detail: old letters and oil leases, spare biscuits, rose thorns, carafes of tea, water and whisky, clock keys, bead dresses and pecans from last season in a box tied up with ribbon.

She leaves Louisiana to attend to the funeral. Her journey has a funny effect on time. It freezes and she begins stepping backwards in the narrative flow of her life to dig into her past: her family and their traditions, her hometown and the people within.

As the train left the black swamp and pulled out into the space of Pontchartrain, the window filled with a featureless sky over pale smooth water, where a seagull was hanging with wings fixed, like a stopped clock on a wall. She must have slept, for nothing seemed to have changed before her eyes until the seagull became the hands on the clock in the Courthouse dome lit up in the night above Mount Salus trees.”

– The Optimist’s Daughter

The funeral gets a little boisterous with the mourners all sharing stories of her father. She feels compelled to correct each account, struggling against the reality that she has no control of his image in death. They each have a different vision of the man. In the days that follow, Laurel reflects on the nature of memory and tradition. Finally, in a confrontation with her step-mother Fay, she seems to realize that preservation of the deceased is more like a quiet duty than a public relations campaign. She draws on the virtues of her late mother and husband, her baking and his craftsmanship, to reorient herself as a person in opposition to Fay’s mindless narcissism.

Welty is a solid, assured writer, good at practically everything: dialogue, worldbuilding, pacing. I especially enjoy when she pairs a beautiful cinematic detail with a meditation of some kind:

Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of match-flame had pierced through the severely cut-back trunk. If it didn’t bloom this year, it would next: “That’s how gardeners must learn to look at it,” her mother would say. Memory returned like spring, Laurel thought. Memory had the character of spring. In some cases, it was the old wood that did the blooming.