Literary Regionalism may have died out as a movement back in the early part of the 20th century, but certainly no one told Bonnie Campbell, LOL. Campbell writes affectionally about rural Michigan; the land, the people, their customs and rhythms of their daily lives.

Those things are again all hereIs this story.The small town of Greenland Township is on the cusp of being overrun by the phenom called suburban sprawl. Q Road (short for Queer Road) is the current line of demarkation. Here the author plants a cast of characters—some quite quirky. It’s difficult to reduce this story to a few lines; it’s easier to tell you how it starts…, Rachel lives with her mother in a houseboat on the river. When her mother disappears, Rachel carries on without telling anyone. She eventually figures out, when the food runs out, she needs to find a job…. and so our story begins.

I very much enjoyed this little novel. And while Campbell writes affectionally, and intimately about rural Michigan, the insights she gifts us are universal.

This is my fifth (of five) Bonnie Jo Campbell book. ( )

Having so much meant a fellow had all that to lose.

...but it was also good sometimes to be at the mercy of uncontrollable forces...disasters brought everybody together and gave them something to remember, put them in a common awe, the way God used to.

While a woman might love Jesus well enough, only a naïve girl would want to be married to him. ( )

I met Bonnie Jo Campbell at a book signing, where I bought this book. (She happened to be at a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan, when we were vacationing in the area.) It's the first book I've read by the author. It's a tale about an odd assortment of people in an area of Michigan near Kalamazoo that's transitioning from farmland to development. I've never seen such an odd cast of characters, but Campbell drew me into the story. There is tragedy and there is humor, and there is a lot of human frailty. Even though some (most) of the characters seemed a little over-the-top, there was a lot to think about as to how real-life people behave. And she left me once again pondering the question: why do city people move to the country, presumably to get away from the city, and then set about trying to turn the country into city?

I read it through quickly wanting to know what happened to the people; after reading the discussion guide in the back of my edition, I think I should read it again more slowly to get the full benefit of what the author was doing. But I rarely do rereads . . . ( )

Campbell's Once Upon a River was one of my favorite books of 2011. When I heard her read from it, she mentioned that the main character, Margo Crane, played a small role in one of her earlier books, Q Road. Q Road was written in 2002, but I'm hoping that fans of Once Upon a River and American Salvage will seek out this earlier book.

Q Road takes place over the course of one day, October 9, 1999, with some flashbacks to round out the story. Rachel Crane, Margo's daughter, has recently married George Harland, who is many years her senior. George is trying to make a living on his family farm in rural Michigan, while farmland around him is being turned into subdivisions with prefab houses. But George still finds it in his heart to allow Sally, an alcoholic whose husband recently left her, and her son David to live rent-free on his land. Their stories intertwine with the stories of Steve and Nicole, Elaine, April May, and other residents of Q Road. Campbell has no problem keeping the threads of the story pulled taut in a way that propels the reader forward. The result is a portrait of life in rural Michigan and a meditation on the difficulties of being your own person while sharing your life with others.

This book placed Bonnie Jo Campbell solidly on my list of favorite authors, and I still haven't read American Salvage yet. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I recently found myself with the opportunity to interview revered author Bonnie Jo Campbell for the CCLaP Podcast; and so before doing so, I thought it would be beneficial to read her two most popular books besides the one I've already read (2011's Once Upon a River, that is, considered by many to be a frontrunner for this year's Pulitzer). And indeed, it turned out to be quite important that I read her 1999 breakout novel Q Road before talking with her, because it turns out to be a clever sort of prequel/sequel to the Once Upon a River title we'll mainly be discussing; set on the cusp of the new millennium, it tells the story of the "last hurrah" of sorts for a rural farmland area just outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan before finally succumbing to the capitalist steamroller of exurban subdivisions, chain restaurants and pristine golf courses, an Altmanesque interrelated ensemble character piece in which one of the characters (teenage tomboy and child bride Rachel Crane) just happens to be the daughter of the main character of Once Upon a River (the even more hardcore tomboy Margo Crane), only with the newer novel set in the older 1970s and examining Margo's own teenage years as a tight-lipped, sharpshooting pregnant runaway.

And in fact you can look at all three of these books in much the same light (including the slim 2009 story collection American Salvage, the third title in this list); they are all episodic in nature, take a sympathetic and nonjudgemental look at the kinds of characters we would traditionally call dumb white trash, yet can frequently reach a level of poetic harshness and violence akin to a Sam Shepard play, stories that don't excuse the behavior of the meth addicts, racists and uneducated hillbillies that populate her universe but that don't dismiss such characters either, an attitude that I'm sure at least partly stems from Campbell's own background as a willful tomboy in this exact kind of rural Michigan environment (but more on that in the finished podcast episode, coming next week). Powerful and unflinching, yet beautiful and easily readable, it's no surprise after reading these three books that Campbell would have the kind of intensely passionate fanbase that she does, as well as racking up such academic tentpoles as a Pushcart Prize, Eudora Welty Prize, National Book Award nomination and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination; and I wholeheartedly recommend them all to a general audience.

Out of 10:
Q Road: 9.4
American Salvage: 9.0 ( )