Nonny Frett’s birth was heralded by a gunshot. She was born in a room littered with glass shards, soaked with blood and shaking with all the shouting. She was born between two feuding families: that of her teenage biological mother, a Crabtree, and her deaf-and-going-blind adopted mother, a Frett — the families mortal enemies since high-falutin’ Bernese Frett insulted the dirty dress of Ona Crabtree. Nonny is Romeo and Juliet all twisted up into one conflicted knot, tangling the families together in a deadly snarl.
Joshilyn Jackson’s second novel, Between, Georgia, is, like Nonny (and like Jackson’s wonderful first novel, Gods in Alabama), born in a place between. The characters, the sense of place, the Gothically complicated scandals and all the skeletons in the closet — yes, this is decisively a Southern novel. But Jackson has no patience for precious prose or for the sweet circumlocution of Southern charm.
Imagining what sex could be like with a better version of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Jonno — a man obsessed with artfully arranging their bodies for the mirror in which he watches them make a movie kind of love — an adult Nonny pictures them “panting, sweaty, unbeautiful.”
The wildness of the disreputable Crabtree clan and the restrained Frett respectability compete for dominance even within Nonny. She goes to college and gets a degree in anthropology, but then does nothing with it, instead marrying her beautiful ska-band boyfriend. And after having her “very last ever goodbye sex” with Jonno for “about the twenty-second time,” Nonny finds her engines revving up again: “The little red Crabtree who lived in my blood had woken and was running wild under everything the Fretts had tried to raise me to be.”
As the simmering family feud works itself up to an explosive all-out war, it’s left to Nonny to find the way to be between, to intervene and make some practical kind of peace between the families of her nature and her nurture.
This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2006.
