On All the Living by C.E. Morgan
By Megan Hope
I’m Megan Hope, a native Southwest Kansan (currently living in the Missouri Ozarks) and proud supporter of HPPR. A book I think will resonate with many High Plains listeners is All the Living, by C.E. Morgan, published in 2009 by Picador and widely available at libraries and booksellers.
Though its themes are timeless, most of the novel is implicitly set during the 1980s in rural Kentucky. Aloma is an orphan, raised for a time in a caring but “impersonal” way by an aunt and uncle, but soon sent to a mission school in the mountains, where she becomes a skilled pianist.
Here’s a taste of Morgan’s arresting, lyrical prose as she describes her protagonist:
“Aloma lived in this dark place, a dark county in a dark state, and it pressed on her ceaselessly as a girl until she finally realized in a moment of prescience that someday adulthood would come with its great shuddering release and she would be free. Then she would leave and find a riseless place where nothing impeded the progress of the sun from the moment it rose in the east until it died out easily, dismissed into the west. That was what she wanted. That more than family, that more than friendship, that more than love. Just the kind of day that couldn’t be recalled into premature darkness by the land.”
Lurching toward a whisper of such freedom, young adult Aloma moves to be with her lover Orren, an alluring tobacco farmer. But Aloma arrives to find Orren as withdrawn and brittle as the drought-stricken land he struggles to work alone, following the gutting deaths of his mother and brother in a car accident.
Aloma wanders through the isolation and uncertainty of this new place, trying to occupy herself and search for stimulation where she can. She finds a position playing piano at a church, whose order and staidness contrasts with the coarseness and perceived sinfulness of her habitation with Orren.
In deciding whether to stay or leave, Aloma must negotiate predictability vs. repression, eroticism vs. love, independence vs. settling, decay vs. promise, patience vs. despair—universal dilemmas of modern life and, perhaps, all times and places.
All the Living was C.E. Morgan’s debut novel and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection. Morgan’s second novel, The Sport of Kings, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
And all this is not just hype. She’s truly a stunningly talented writer and storyteller who’s drawn comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, Wendell Berry, and Marilynne Robinson.
Morgan studied English and voice at Berea College in Kentucky and has a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, which likely accounts for her skillful use of scripture and biblical allusions, including the book’s very title.
At just under 200 pages, All the Living is a quick, captivating read. Lovers of the High Plains will appreciate its vivid descriptions of stifling heat, crops “meagering little water” from the earth, the vastness of loss, and the hopeful hobbling of newborn calves.
This is Megan Hope for the High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club.
