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    Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel
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    Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel
    Ebook435 pages8 hours

    Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel

    By M. Glenn Taylor

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “M. Glenn Taylor’s plain spoken eloquence on labor, race, and war recalls the voices in Studs Terkel’s inspired Working. The Marrowbone Marble Company is a novel of stirring clarity and power.”
    —Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Lark and Termite

     

    Author M. Glenn Taylor was nominated for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for his novel The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. Taylor returns spectacularly with The Marrowbone Marble Company, a sweeping story set against the changing landscape of post-World War II America that recalls The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and the early lyrical work of Cormac McCarthy. A masterwork of Southern fiction that the National Book Award-winning author of Spartina, John Casey, calls, “a terrific rough-and-tumble novel,” The Marrowbone Marble Company is a gift from a truly exhilarating American voice.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 11, 2010
    ISBN9780061993589
    Unavailable
    Marrowbone Marble Company: A Novel
    Author

    M. Glenn Taylor

    Glenn Taylor is the author of the novels A Hanging at Cinder Bottom, The Marrowbone Marble Company and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, GQ, and Electric Literature, among others. Glenn was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he now lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, where he teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University.

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    Reviews for Marrowbone Marble Company

    3/5

    6 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wonderful writing, well drawn and interesting characters, with the background of war and the civil rights movement.
    • 4/5
      I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher.Young orphan Loyal Ledford leaves his job at a glass factory to join the Marines after Pearl Harbor. His experiences in Guadalcanal change him forever and he returns home a broken alcoholic plagued by recurring nightmares. Loyal manages to marry the sweetheart he left behind and decides to start a new life on some land owned by distant relatives. A dream tells him to build a marble factory and Loyal uses the opportunity to create a utopian community of blacks and whites working towards to a better life and civil rights. As the fledging community works to create a better world, their ideals of passive resistance and peaceful civil disobedience are challenged in ways they never expected.I have been putting off reviewing this book because I don't really know how to describe it. To me, it is a male version of Stockett's THE HELP. While it wasn't the most pleasurable read, I find myself bringing it up in conversation over and over again and I can't stop thinking about.....often the hallmarks of a great read for me. While a good part of this book is about the civil rights struggles, I felt an important theme was the conflict between peaceful and violent resistance. The reader must decide along with Loyal whether or not there are times when violence is justified. The bok is incredibly moving and thought-provoking.BOTTOM LINE: Highly recommended. This may be the best book I've read this year. Excellent character development and filled with challenging and interesting ideas. A great conversation starter that will stay with you for a long time.
    • 1/5
      I almost NEVER do not finish a book, but I gave up on this. Uggghhhh..... boring!!! It was as if the author sort of had a story line to write about, but not really..... so had to write about whatever the editor recommended. Slowest moving plot imaginable.
    • 3/5
      Loyal Ledford grows up surrounded by tragedy, and at age thirteen is left to raise himself simply and quietly. Being alone suits him, and he works hard, not making waves. He enlists after Pearl Harbor, eager to defend his homeland. Being sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, he learns the horrors of war and the fragility of friendships. He returns to West Virginia an angry man, an alcoholic really, who is unable to cope when faced with cruelties in the world. He begins by shutting out the newspaper...he can't bear to hear of other tragedies in the world. As the civil rights struggles heat up, he is shocked and angered by a country that willingly lets blacks fight alongside whites, but then denies them the ability to sit together at a restaurant or on a bus. This disparity eats at him, until he thinks he's found the solution. He sets out to create a utopian community deep in the hills, one that allows people of different races to live side by side, work the land, and form a closeknit family structure, one that he never had. It works out beautifully, for a time. The success he finds eases his injured heart, and he begins to forget the ugliness of the War he fought.However, word gets out about his community and he's labelled a Communist, and the new community faces its first real challenges: surviving amid the hate from the outside world directed at it. Things begin to go terribly wrong, and the inner person he thought he left behind returns. This work of fiction is well-written and shows the different ways people try and repent from their sins....Ledford sincerely wants to make things right. The clue though, is that besides the newspaper, he then shuts out television, unable to cope with any sort of evil without taking it personally. It's apparent that he is only comfortable in a made-up world of his own making. When he is outside the community, his personality changes. However, he's a likable character and the story unfolds beautifully. A little too beautifully. His new community seems too ideal, the residents behaving perfectly, and a mutual understanding that is a little bit unimaginable. There are no disputes over housing, work, or food, and the ability for everyone to get along so well was unrealistic. Additionally, I kept wondering where the money was coming from, as money for this community and the new marble factory they build is never an issue. I thought that seemed a glaring omission, and it unsettled me throughout the last half of the novel. Outside the depictions of war, this is a very peaceful book, a pleasant read that appeals because it represents an ideal most people yearn for. The underlying character study of Ledford is what makes it unique, and shows how complicated people are, and how difficult it is to flee from the past.
    • 2/5
      The protagonists of The Marrowbone Marble Company share the same slow and determined methodical air that permeates M. Glenn Taylor’s portrayal of mid-century West Virginia—but that’s hardly surprising is it? With the main character of a name Loyal Ledford, it’s no surprise the whole cast consists of down-home, hard-working folks making do in a harsh land.And that’s the major problem with the novel, it delivers exactly what’d you expect. Its motives are well enough: to conjure those ghosts of racism and inequality of the era—and the hope of people fighting to change it. But the execution often feels contrived due to paper-thin character motivation that isn’t well masked with pretentious literary imagery. It all feels like a particularly sluggishly didactic lecture about the horrors of racism… and profit-only motivated business … and trauma of war on soldiers… and drinking… an-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.**I received The Marrowbone Marble Company from the Goodreads’s First Reads.
    • 5/5
      I was blown away by this novel. It’s rare for a story to move me to tears and elicit the strong emotional reaction that this one did. It really does have the feel of an American classic; the prose, time period, civil rights themes and country setting were reminiscent of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I became very involved in the story, and closing the book after the last page was like saying goodbye to well-loved friends.The novel covers a wide span of time in under 400 pages, from the main character, Ledford’s combat experiences in the Pacific in World War II, up through West Virginia in 1969. Throughout Ledford’s experiences, the idea of hating another human for the color of their skin remains a strong theme, both in his combat experiences and in his coal-mining town which is still subject to segregation. Ledford decides to challenge the status quo, and founds a marble company and a small, self-sufficient community that boasts people of all classes and colors. The little utopia soon faces the wrath of residents who dislike the idea of integration. Character development is a crucial component of a novel for me; Taylor didn’t go into as much depth with the all of the characters as I typically prefer (although Ledford’s character is fully fleshed out). I think in this novel, however, the themes and setting became characters in and of themselves, such that not having a lot of depth to some of the characters didn’t feel detrimental to the overall quality of the novel.What makes this novel feel like a classic is the timelessness of the themes. It drives home that the hate that spawned segregation and civil rights abuses, is no different than the hate that led to the near-extermination of the Native American population, and no different than other atrocities that, sadly, will occur in the future of humankind. Yet somehow the novel never becomes bogged down in hopelessness; it sends the message that one person standing up for what they believe can make a difference even against a tide of hate.