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Like a country quilt, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's spellbinding first novel, Getting Mother's Body, is pieced together from rags: short and slanted scraps of narrative recounted by various friends and members of the hard-luck Beede clan of Ector County, Texas. These sad, wily, bickering voices tell the story of Billy Beede--poor, unmarried, and pregnant--and her dead mother, the "hot and wild" blues singer, Willa Mae Beede, who may or may not have been laid to rest with a fortune of diamonds and pearls in her coffin. When a letter arrives announcing that a supermarket is being built on the ground where Willa Mae was buried, Billy determines to dig her up and get the jewels. But Willa Mae's embittered female lover, Dill Smiles, is just as intent on keeping the corpse in the ground. Deeper and richer than a typical quest novel, Getting Mother's Body is also the story of an African-American family, of beauty winding like bright thread through long-held grudges, hopelessness, and greed. --Regina Marler
 
 Customer Reviews 
A run romp through rural Texas
Rating: 
Parks's novel has been compared to Faulker's "As I Lay Dying", presumably because each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person. The story line is clear enough, young un-married Billy Beede finds herself jilted after buying a beautiful wedding dress that costs too much, traveling a long distance by bus with the rest of her money to meet her fiance on the day before their planned wedding. When she arrives, not only does she discover he is not at home but that he has a wife and gaggle of children. She decides she needs to abort her pregnancy, but does not have the money to do so. She decides that she is going to unearth her buried mother's remains, and lay claim to the riches her mother insisted on being buried with. The only problem is that her mother is buried in Arizona and Billy does not have the money or the transportation to get there. She decides to con her mother's ex-lover, who claims to have carried out the dying wishes of Billy's mother and buried the pearl necklace and diamond ring with her. But did she? After all, she has the expense of a hog farm to keep up, and that shiny new truck... Billy steals the keys to Dill's new truck to make the trek to Arizona with various family members towing along hoping for a fair share of the riches. Dill, of course, races to get there first to prevent the truth from coming out, that no jewels were in fact buried with Billy's mother.
Since each chapter is told from a differing perspective, we gain insight into each characters motivations, thoughts, and of course, their lack of insight as well. The shifting perspective is a refreshing way to tell a story, if not entirely original. The characters keep you interested and the story unfolds without much effort to concentrate. I enjoyed this book and will read this author again.
Great book!
Rating: 
This book is wonderfully written and tells a wonderful story of a young girl on a life journey. From the first page to the last page it captured me and pulled me into each character. This book will not disappoint. The twists are unexpected and delightfully entertaining!
A compressed nod to Faulkner?
Rating:
Suzan-Lori Parks, better known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, came out with her first novel, Getting Mother's Body, a few years ago. In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer interview of May 26, 2003, she called the work "a deep and reverent bow to William Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying,' which also has characters on a journey dealing with a dead relative."
It may be, but don't expect the complex southern saunter of language. Ms. Parks spares the page unneeded words with a beautiful economy, possibly the result of being accustomed to showing stories on stage through dialog and action. In this case, the use of shifting narrative points of view drives the action and yet circles back on it, like advancing the plot and character development through a spiral instead of a straight line. You keep coming back to previous point, stripping back layer after layer and showing the complexity not only of character, but of life. Other than saying that this journey is a quest for something valuable that may or may not be sequestered in a given place, I won't go much into the plot. What is important is not the arrival at the destination or even the destination itself, but the process of traveling. Perhaps that's what made it resound for me. Our final destination is, after all, physical death, so we have is the traveling. I also liked the use of dialect as a leveling factor. No matter how high and mighty some people might be in the social era of the time, the expression of thought and feeling was generally the same, showing more of a kinship than perhaps many of the people would have wanted to admit.
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