While earning critical acclaim and acknowledgment is inherently a goal for most writers, the more highly one's work is respected, the higher the bar is set for future pieces.
Kalamazoo-based author Bonnie Jo Campbell thrives on that kind of pressure.
After being named a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her short story collection American Salvage, Campbell was catapulted into the literary spotlight in 2009.
Campbell's latest novel, Once Upon a River, lives up to the hype earning spots on numerous summer reading lists including those for Newsweek, NPR and the Daily Beast. The story is surprisingly quiet yet unsparingly violent.
Set in the isolated small town of Murrayville (bordering Kalamazoo) around the turn of 1980, the book's main character is Margo Crane, who belongs to the town's namesake Murray family. Margo's father was a bastard child of the Murray patriarch, an outcast living across the river from the family homestead in a tiny shack with his daughter.
The teenaged Margo has an unearthly beauty that makes her a target. Ultimately a string of events leaves her father dead and Margo embarks on a river odyssey through rural Michigan in search of her vanished mother.
| Reading with Bonnie Jo Campbell Schuler Books and Music, Eastwood locations Sept. 22, 7 p.m. Free schulerbooks.com, (517) 316-7495 |
Margo is a fascinating character, an almost silent heroine who transmits most of her communication through action. In crafting the character, Campbell was drawn to the idea of how the girl's beauty would affect her life.
"I'm always interested in how beauty really is as much of a curse as a blessing," Campbell said. "For a young woman, it's very much a curse."
The struggle for survival is also entrenched throughout the tale; Margo even takes on the character of Annie Oakley, her chosen idol (Margo also has an uncanny ability with a rifle).
"She works hard in the way farm women used to work hard," Campbell said. "She doesn't really think about her own pleasure, her own advancement or her own self-actualization. I was trying to capture that feeling of [pioneer life]. I think it's a peculiarly American thing that we are aware of survival - the idea that you could live off the great American land somehow."
