One Sweet Quarrel

by Deirdre McNamer

In her dazzling second novel, Deirdre McNamer uses an enigmatic and haunting narrative voice - one that recalls the narrators in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera - to limn a story of three siblings who venture from their muffled turn-of-the-century Midwestern childhoods into the heedless twenties. Daisy Lou Malone strikes out for a singing career in New York City. Carlton Malone becomes a hard-drinking hustler on his home turf, while Jerry Malone, lured by the promise of free land, joins other unlikely homesteaders in northern Montana, where the most extravagant dreams can be had for the asking and the most modest hopes can be dashed in a season. Jerry's inept farming ventures are ruined by the reality of drought and hail. He and his young wife, oddly relieved, move to town and make plans to move farther west - to Seattle. The discovery of oil beneath the scraped prairie halts them in their tracks. Jerry's gusher dreams are vivid, though les