Culture | A gun on every wall

“Gun Love” reflects a tragic American reality

Jennifer Clement’s new novel is appallingly timely

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Gun Love. By Jennifer Clement. Hogarth; 245 pages; $25 and £14.99.

AT THE emergency foster home, they call the children “shoots”. The word invokes growth and greenness, but it has a different meaning in the 21st-century Florida of Jennifer Clement’s “Gun Love”. “We call you children shoots because your parents were shot,” a social worker tells 14-year-old Pearl France, the narrator.

Pearl grew up in a trailer park, and not even in a trailer: she lived in a battered Mercury, its tyres flat, the boot full of heirlooms that Margot, her mother, purloined when she fled home as a pregnant teenager. Margot dies halfway through the novel, but her fate is foreshadowed from the first pages. “In our part of Florida things were always being gifted a bullet just for the sake of it,” Pearl says.

It would be tempting to call Ms Clement’s book timely, were gun violence not so pervasive in America, where on average 19 children are shot every day. Pearl lives in a world so saturated with guns that the only question is when, not if, the trigger will be pulled. After her mother’s death she settles into the foster home, but her life there, though happier and more stable, is haunted by the past—in particular by Margot’s connection to Eli, a sinister lover who was part of a gun-running ring. “My mother was a cup of sugar,” Pearl says in the opening lines. “You could borrow her anytime.”

Margot, a rich girl gone bad, is perfect prey for a man like Eli. Too perfect, perhaps: her character suffers another kind of danger, that of veering into stereotype, as does Corazón, her tough yet sentimental Mexican trailer-park neighbour. The ending is predictable. But “Gun Love” is lifted by its language, as in this simple, shocking incantation of the smuggled weaponry loaded onto a bus:

In the belly of the Greyhound bus there was a Smith & Wesson M&P assault rifle, DPMS Panther Arms assault rifle, Smith & Wesson handgun, Llama handgun, Glock pistol, Smith & Wesson pistol, Taurus pistol, Del-Ton assault rifle, .40-calibre semiautomatic pistol, .45-calibre Glock, Beretta pistol, Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol, Remington shotgun, Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, .22-calibre Savage Mark II rifle, Springfield Armory semiautomatic handgun, Smith & Wesson semiautomatic rifle, Remington shotgun, Glock .40-calibre semiautomatic pistol, FN Herstal pistol, Beretta 92 FS 9mm pistol, and a Beretta PX4 Storm pistol.

With this hammering list, Ms Clement creates a weird poetry of murderous force. Chekhov’s narrative principle—that a gun hung on the wall in the first act must eventually go off—has become a metaphorical rule of storytelling. To reflect American reality, Ms Clement puts a gun on every wall in every room.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A gun on every wall"

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