The Quickening

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Product Description
A July 2010 Indie Next Pick

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her spouse, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary makes a clean and orderly home life for her stormy spouse, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on.  Despite having small in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Fantastic Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting national against national, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threaten to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well.
   In this luminous and unforgettable debut, Michelle Hoover explores the polarization of the human soul in times of hardship and the instinctual drive for self-preservation by whatever means necessary. The Quickening stands as a novel of lyrical precision and past consequence, shiny the resilience and sacrifices required even now in our modern troubled times.

For information, tour dates, and reading group resources, visit www.michellehoover.net.Amazon.com Review
Amy Greene Reviews The Quickening

Amy Greene is the leader of Bloodroot.

I can usually tell within the first few pages whether or not I’ll like a book. With Michelle Hoover’s novel The Quickening, I knew from the first line. The voices of Enidina and Mary, two Iowa farmwives bound by their struggle to survive in the lonesome upper Midwest on the cusp of the Fantastic Depression, are that real and charged with emotion. Straight away, it was clear that I was in capable hands with this debut leader.

Reading The Quickening, I was reminded of Willa Cather’s rugged depiction of 1900s prairie life in My Antonia, and Jane Smiley’s complex portrayal of a Midwestern farming family tree in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Thousand Acres. But Hoover’s point of view is uniquely her own, having grown up herself in the Midwest she writes about so vividly, the granddaughter of Iowa farmers. The Quickening is inspired by the life of the leader’s fantastic-grandmother, and although Hoover’s authorial hand is never heavy, her personal stake in the tale undoubtedly lends to the psychological suspense of the narrative and the emotional reminiscence of the tragic events that play out as a result of Eddie and Mary’s turbulent relationship. While Hoover’s prose is silent and understated, it thrums with tension from beginning to end, so that I establish myself lost in the pages for hours at a time. Finishing The Quickening was like waking from a dream, or another life I had lived for a while. Perhaps Michelle Hoover’s greatest accomplishment with her first novel is her ability to draw the reader so completely into the world she has made, to give the reader a window into the past and into the hearts and minds of her unforgettable characters.

The Quickening is an exciting discovery, introducing a fresh storytelling voice and promising a distinguished body of work to look forwards to, as well as a new favorite leader to add to my list. Michelle Hoover is a stunning literary talent with a long career yet to be of her.

Questions for Michelle Hoover

Q: The thought behind your novel, The Quickening, came from an ancient family tree document you learned—tell us about that.
A: It wasn’t until my twenties that my mother gave me a copy of my fantastic-grandmother’s journal, only about fifteen pages. I doubt many in my family tree considered journal keeping–both the time it took and the “navel-staring” required–to be worth much in comparison to a excellent day’s work. In beginning to write at all, my fantastic-grandmother was surely urged on by her daughter, my eccentric Fantastic-Aunt Ollie, and also by the recent loss of her spouse, Frank–a loss that left my fantastic-grandmother so stunned and weary that she didn’t know what else to do with herself. Perhaps my life, she started, and that of my dear spouse has meant small or nothing to anyone except to us and our immediate family tree…. What followed was a voice and tale that carried more sadness and regret than I ever thought possible of my silent family tree. Aunt Ollie typed up her mother’s pages and inserted family tree photographs, the people in which appeared dour and wind-swept and proud. With the combination of my fantastic-grandmother’s voice and persons faces, I was hooked. When I sat down to write my own Enidina, her voice came easily. Suddenly I was inside a woman who’d lived through the turn of the century and the chaos and confusion that followed, a woman now exhausted more by the loss of her family tree than any event history had thrown at her. It was this loss that kept her talking and kept me trying to know what happened to place her in such a place.

Q: After you establish this letter, how did you find out more about your family tree history?
A: I looked through additional family tree documents–though there weren’t many–and researched the time period. Some of my fantastic-grandmother’s tale seemed impossible, such as the meteorite she claimed struck a nearby farm and broke windows “for miles around.” I’ve establish no proof of such an occurrence, but I also couldn’t place the thought alone and so wrote it into the book–a bewildering incident in the eyes of my two farmwomen and their neighbors, enlarged to a metaphoric level by Mary’s religious vehemence and guilt. My mother took any number of last-minute “is this possible?” calls and was the first to tell me about the family tree “cave,” an earthy food cellar detached from the house and which I establish fascinating both in name and function. My uncle Lowell was also a fantastic help for details, and we had several phone conversations about hog slaughtering and additional time period questions, such as what the family tree ate during different seasons and how they might have prepared the food. My uncle is a natural storyteller as are a large number of the men in my family tree, men who are silent, kind, and deeply religious with simple, wistful laughs and dark singing voices.

Q: And is it right that the character Enidina is loosely based on your fantastic-grandmother’s tale?
A: Yes, though Enidina is also very much her own character. I used my fantastic-grandmother’s recent loss of her spouse to compel Enidina’s own tale. I borrowed my fantastic-grandparents’ real-life hardships during the Depression and the strangeness of the wars. The way Enidina and Frank meet in the book is nearly the same as my fantastic-grandparents’ meeting. My fantastic-grandmother, but, was a tall slender woman, to some extent severe and intolerably industrious. Because I never knew Melva, Enidina’s physicality is that of my grandmother, another powerful matriarch both in stature and will, with the largest hands I have ever seen on a woman. Many of her grandsons have these hands now. But Enidina is far plainer than either woman, so unadorned in fact that I felt bound to give her fiery red hair, a hint of the boldness and determination hidden within an otherwise modest front. I wanted at least one of my women to gain the reader’s interest through physical and mental fortitude alone, lacking the simple gifts of charm and beauty that successful women–particularly today–are assumed to have and cultivate.

Q: As a native of Iowa, you’ve set your debut novel in a place you know well. Could this have taken place anywhere else? Can you speak to the role of place in your writing?
A: For me, the book really needed to be set in the Midwest, and in the part of the region I know best–the flat middle ground where the mind expands and there’s small between the horizon and the homestead to stop it. Even though I live in the east now, this landscape is a part of me and my temperament, a way of keeping things level, where self-obsession and unbridled emotion are simply inconsiderate and wasteful. The landscape carries the same sense of absence that I felt after my father’s unexpected death when I was teenager, and because I left the place only a few years later, it hasn’t lost it. But there’s a beauty there too, though it’s silent, and there’s a peace, though for me this peace is taut with the threat of change. I regularly stayed away from home after I graduated from college, possibly as a way to shake off that absence. Only in the last year of finishing the book did my mother reveal that southern Iowa, where my fantastic-grandmother’s farm was, is full of low, rolling hills. This seemed impossible to me and in no way suits any memory I have of my family tree or the landscape they existed on. Nonetheless, Enidina, my Enidina, could not exist in a place with hills.

Q: Where does the title come from?
A: I’m not sure when I first learned the term “the quickening” for a child’s first movements in the womb, but the axiom seems both treacherous and marvelous to me, full of life and the possibility of its loss. Both factually and metaphorically, Enidina herself is permanently on the verge of this quickening, on the threshold of something new. For a rural woman in the early 1900s, such a feeling promised a new child, but also the possibility of its death, or the death of the mother herself. It was a miracle and a curse at once. All that Enidina knows of her only grandchild is the feeling of this quickening when she touches her daughter’s stomach before long before the girl leaves home. It is this child she is writing to and searching for from the beginning of the book. The child is the only reason she is telling the tale at all.

Q: While the novel takes place nearly 100 years ago, do the thoughts of self-reliance and the support women offer one another in times of hardship stand right today?
A: Most certainly. The majority of women I know are tough souls. They have survived miscarriages and the deaths of loved ones, rape, abuse, abandonment, and sadness. Though men obviously suffer the same, these are the kinds of losses that affect women to such an extent that the thought of the long-suffering female has become a cliché. As a result, women must be exceptionally strong and regularly need to do so lacking recognition or complaint. Of course women have also been granted an easiness and openness with each additional that society both expects and ordains–an expectation that isolates Enidina when she fails to live up to her gender. For the most part, but, women have the ability to seek out friendships and attain a closeness that many male relationships simply do not allow. Mary’s spouse, Jack, for instance is never granted an emotional reprieve in this novel, a circumstance I consider common. As a Midwestern man in the early 1900s, he simply has nowhere to go with his confusion, temper, and disappointments, and he becomes a tragic figure. Women of course can also be terribly cruel to each additional if they consider something that is theirs, something they like, is threatened. Much of this cruelty is instinctual, nearly animal. It is the ferocity of the mother protecting her young. But it can also provoke the kind of greed and egocentricity that even today keeps women from achieving everything they could.

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