Logic - Hardcover

Vernon's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, 2003's Eden, is a dark and harrowing portrait of catastrophically scarred people in rural Valsin County, Miss. The sad story of Logic Harris, named after a word her mother saw in a magazine and pregnant by 13, will undoubtedly remind many readers of early Toni Morrison, particularly The Bluest Eye. Nearly killed as a child when she fell out of a tree, Logic is now "touched"-in every sense of the word: she "[doesn't] even talk in a straight line," and her father sexually abuses and impregnates her. But somehow, as Logic watches her neighbor's whoring and feels the growing "butterflies in her stomach," she retains an angelic innocence. All but abandoned by a used-up mother, who suffers "the drought of her wilted body" and secretly wishes her daughter dead, and an angry father teetering on the verge of insanity, Logic struggles to navigate the secrets and silences that have poisoned the adult world around her. Although Logic's hallucinogenic, disjointed outlook and language can be utterly incomprehensible at times, Vernon's alchemical imagination transforms passages that make no sense on their own ("a long death breathes nakedly behind the blood where red is turning sharp") into a whole as startlingly original, disconcerting and haunting as a fever dream.
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The author of Eden (2002) offers another haunting, experimental novel set in a rural, mostly African American Mississippi community. "Too" Harris willfully blocks out the reality of what's happening in her family: her husband is routinely raping their daughter, Logic. Barely an adolescent and pregnant with her father's child, Logic has retreated into a nightmarish world of denial and symbolism. Surrounded by women--such as the prostitute across the street and the white woman for whom Too works--whose souls have been crushed by unspeakable violence, Logic turns for help to her only friend, a boy she calls the Tallest, the prostitute's son. When his help fails, Logic tries to find her own way out of misery. As in Eden, Vernon writes with astonishing, original poetry that finds the perpetrator and victim in everyone. Steeped in religious, surreal imagery and references to ordering principles--atoms, alphabets, life's basic materials--Vernon's abstract language examines the chances for survival in a lawless world where safety, love, and even joy are concepts, not realities. Gillian Engberg
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