Rilla Askew’s new novel, “Kind of Kin,” sneaks over the border of literary fiction to make a case for more compassion in the immigration debate. It’s a timely argument, of course. Even while Mitt Romney was blaming his loss on President Obama’s “gifts,” Republicans agreed that their party must develop a better attitude toward Hispanic voters — current and future. As if to show the way, “Kind of Kin” spotlights a single American family dragged toward social enlightenment.
Askew, who has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, specializes in broad family dramas that often reflect dark corners of our nation’s racial geography. Her first novel, “The Mercy Seat” (1997), is a Cain-and-Abel tale set in Oklahoma’s Indian Territory. “Fire in Beulah” (2001) takes place around the Tulsa race riots of 1921. “Kind of Kin” is lighter than those books, but it’s also more polemical.
The story rotates through several points of view, allowing the focus to shift from intimate moments in a country kitchen to policy debates in the national news. Over a period of three weeks in early 2008, a harried wife and mother named Sweet Kirkendall is thrown into a crisis that reorders her life. As the novel opens in Cedar, Okla., population 581, Sweet’s born-again father has been arrested for harboring 14 illegal immigrants in his barn. Offered a chance for bail, he refuses to enter a plea and insists on being a martyr in the fight against a strict new immigration law. “Don’t worry,” he tells Sweet. “All things work together for good to them that love God.” He may know his New Testament, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing to his daughter. His righteous stand not only baffles Sweet but dumps his orphaned grandson, Dustin, on her doorstep. With her husband off working on a gas pipeline, she’s frantic to get her dad out of jail while caring for a bedridden relative at home and trying to keep her son and 10-year-old Dustin from “fighting like heathens.” No wonder she “hadn’t slept a drop.”
These opening chapters are tremendously engaging as Askew whips up chance encounters, misunderstandings and arguments into a rolling tangle of complications. Sweet’s family is torn apart by zealots on both sides of the immigration debate. Her father knows that Jesus wants us to welcome all strangers; her husband is just as sure that these undocumented, low-wage workers are spreading like “fire ants swarming up from Texas.” And in the lives of frightened, enterprising immigrants, we can see the human cost of laws that separate parents, create an underground economy and put poor people at constant risk of exploitation.
It’s also refreshing to see devout Christians led by prayer to act as radical advocates for social justice, instead of their usual role in the liberal imagination as homophobic, child-abusing, gun-toting bigots. (How quickly the Left forgot the church’s role in the civil rights movement.)
But otherwise, “Kind of Kin” is kind of obvious. Much of the story takes place in a fit of domestic hysteria, as though this were a bedroom farce about immigration policy. That disconnect between the novel’s subject and its antic tone begins to grate as the story moves along. Sweet is sympathetic, but the more she carries on with her deep-fat-fried anxieties and her needle-pointed theology, the less interesting she seems. There’s lots of hand-wringing as she adds “another little Lincoln log of guilt” to the long list of her failings. I couldn’t wait for her to emigrate from the 1950s into the modern age.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
.JPG)
Loading...
Comments