Light While There is Light

This brilliant fictional memoir of an American family begins with ghosts: the moans of the author’s mother. And indeed, Waldrop’s ghostly portrait of his mother and other family members is, in part, a kind of American haunting, a haunting of the mind, of dreams, of aspirations, and, most of all, of the spirit.

Born into a deeply religious family, the author and his siblings are taken by their mother across the Midwest and South as she searches for the “right” religious sect and educates them in various forms of fundamentalism, a trip that ends with the mother speaking in tongues and eventually in her total isolation.

It is not only his mother, however, but the author’s brothers who are utterly transformed by her spiritual thirst. Unable to cope properly with a world of little moral values, the brothers themselves become involved in shady business operations and sham religious institutions.

In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop follows a tradition that stretches back to Hawthorne, Poe, Faulkner, and O’Connor as he illuminates, in plain, poetic prose, the fear, madness, and destruction lurking beneath the polished surfaces of the American experience.