Initially, readers are very likely to be simply blown away by the unwearied, prototypal dander of Vernon's writing. There's hardly a page in the entire work which doesn't contain a surprising, original association or a uniting of concepts that we usually consider to be from quite different and distinct spheres. For example:

They all looked up on the branch above them where a sparrow, alive, had begun to sing, as if it had seen many disasters on the back roads of Mississippi.

She was arranging cups and saucers to match the blue-rimmed porecelain tiles of the floor. She was careful with her work. Dropping glass was as dangerous as catching babies. Everything that went into her mouth was broken into tiny pieces—the bones in her face fragile, the empty breasts, as if there was no fat beneath the nipples to push her self-esteem forward.

In this account, I'm not going to dwell too much upon the episodes and individual scenes of the story, itself, which is brutal, violent, sexually shocking, awash in powerful lives and deaths, strong emotions, and hardships; nor am I going to spend a lot of time on the relationships between the characters, which are rich and complex. Innocence defrocked is always going to contain large measures of pain. And, though this is not a plot-driven novel—it's plotless in a Chekhovian way—it's, nevertheless, a true page-turner because of Vernon's verbal thunderflashes. One wonders what evocative phrasings she's going to come up with next!

Instead, I'm going to concentrate on some elements of the structural underpinnings of the book.

David Harris and his wife, Too, live with their thirteen-year-old daughter, Logic, in rural Valsin County, Mississippi. The novel recounts their everyday experiences as well as those of some of their neighbors, principally a prostitute named George and her children, whom we come to know by designations instead of proper names: the girl, the tallest, curtis (lower case 'c') [names and naming comprise a vital part of the way Vernon invites the reader to see the world]. Early on, in the action, the scenes are grim: David loads a gun; Logic has a terrible fall out of an oak tree; David and Logic have incestuous relations; the tallest sodomizes the girl; George gives birth and nearly dies; the tallest kills a hatchling fetus from a bird's nest. Perhaps the most important thing a reader may notice, in these first pages, is how Vernon uses words and images to connect characters as a means of demonstrating human contact. Let me try to explain.

The book begins with a brief prologue about a lamb that is "struck a heavy blow" and begins to bleed profusely from the head. (This sequence is Biblically resonant, containing scripture-like passages such as "For He was that He is.") Just a page later, in reading about Logic's fall from the tree, we learn that "her head filled with blood". Shortly thereafter, we meet a lady called the Missis, whose house is a converted church, and, on one, of the windows "There was a picture of a lamb grazing.". The Missis remarks, "A lamb is a trapped child." Logic smells the Missis' hair and finds that there is blood in it ("You got blood in your hair...like me."). And, so, a conspiracy of similarities is formed: the lamb, Logic, and the Missis all bleed from the head; the lamb is actually physically manifested, its image on the window; Logic, thirteen years old and forced to have sex with her own father, is certainly a trapped child; therefore, she is certainly a lamb; etc.. But what does it all mean? How do we connect the dots? Vernon makes no suggestion; readers are invited to participate of their own accord.

In a second example, the image of an index finger is repeated several times in different contexts.

Trying to quiet his younger siblings, the tallest: "There he was raising his index finger in the air like a dipolomat, shouting." Then: "The tallest had dared her to speak, his index finger over her mouth." Again: "But the tallest turned away from him and raised his index finger again." Soon, "Too brought her hand to her face: the index finger rested on the tip of her nose." Later, "Logic had spent the hours looking at her index finger." Again, "David was not thinking of the man, not really, but the sound of his index finger in a glass of ice cubes." Now, you might say 'So What?', but the image of the finger is not one that would commonly pop up, and certainly not so many times; yet, like the images of the blood and the lamb, the meaning is left open—we intuit the symbolism, the imagery, but we can't grasp it fully. The reader is both invited and shut out at the same time. Challenging! The characters are enveloped in a swirl of cosmic language-dust.

The lamb/blood and the index finger aren't the only examples of this catching neology , which for convenience's sake we may just call "recurrence". We'll look at some more examples in a moment; but I would like to remark, here, that recurrence is one of five principal motifs a reader should be watching for in Logic; four others are those of names and naming; allusions to science, nature, and mathematics; attunement to the workings of the human body; and Mississppi as a sort of eternal land, an archetype. We'll go over each briefly, continuing, now, with recurrence.

A third recurrence has to do with the returning image/symbol of a wire hanger. Early on, the young girl Logic is carrying two wire hangers, one in each hand. Asked what she plans to do with them, she gives the surprising response that she wants to make wings. Much later in the story, in a more serious moment, we see a wire hanger being used to perform an abortion. Here the recurrence is relatively straightforward. A fourth involves the rather odd comparison of people's bodies to geometrical shapes—in one case a pyramid and, in the other, a trapezoid. The imagery of insects and bugs, particularly in regard to David Harris, is a fifth case (in one scene, he opens his mouth to speak and inadvertantly swallows a lightning bug; in another, after he is stung by an insect, its antennae get caught underneath his skin). A sixth case involves human nipples and breasts, recurring at least four or five times, by my count. And there are several more that alert readers may look for. In my reading experience, this sort of application of trademarks and josses containing sometimes synonymous, sometimes opposite meanings is quite singular; I'm sure I've never seen anything like it before. I'm not sure of the import it has, or the amount we should give it, but it's one-of-a-kind. Consider the following names and designations:

George (a female)

David

Logic

Too

curtis

the tallest

The Principle

the Missis

Celesta (a doll)

the man-made-of-paper

the girl

the ex-con

the old woman

the woman

The only one of these that is, in any way, "normal" is David; every other one carries critical information about the given character, and what's interesting about the methods of expression is that, sometimes, the description is as simple as can be, a mere generic noun (the girl, the woman), sometimes a sort of proper name (notice that The Principle has the "t" in "The" capitalized, while the "t" in "the Missis" does not; why?). Sometimes, the names are outwardly, boldly symbols, as the Missis—half of the phonemes contained in the whole word 'Mississippi', it dawned on me after a while—is clearly a symbol of Mississippi, itself ("Logic was in the Missis' bedroom, bending hangers for her wings. The Missis herself was naked. Her breasts were deformed, her waist meek."; In other words, the old order is collapsing, decaying, not strong. New days are dawning.) Sometimes, a person's designation has to do with what they do; for instance, the man-made-of-paper is a rich john who comes to visit George frequently, and the ex-con is self-explanatory. However, the most interesting name is that of 'the tallest'. Writing it that way, instead of 'The Tallest', is more visual, almost like inserting a little picture of him in the text where his name should be, and even though we're explicitly told that the tallest is the way Logic thinks of him, no one else in the book thinks of him any differently or refers to him by any proper name. Lastly, in regard to the name of 'Celesta'—an interesting choice of name for the doll of a black child in rural Mississippi! At a couple of points, however, a book by an unnamed Italian philosopher is mentioned as being in the tallest's possession, and the tallest has frequent social interaction with Logic, whose doll Celesta is; maybe there's a correlation.

In any case, the subject of the names and designations of the characters is intensely interesting if for no other reason than that it's so refreshingly unusual. (I wish I had the time to go into it further.)

Concerning the third and fourth motifs—those of awareness of the body and its functions and allusions to science, mathematics and nature—our Q and A with Vernon, below, touches on these, and they're sufficiently important to let the author speak for herself, there. I just want to point out that, over the course of the whole of Logic, there begins to unfold a view of a human life not only as a series of mental and emotional experiences but, also, as a biosystem—literally as a functioning biological organism whose rhythms and processes work in unison with the mind. Of course, at some level, we're all aware of this, but it's rare that one sees this most basic, this most visceral understanding brought out, full blush, in a work of imaginative literature. Virtually every page resounds with it, and it's an extremely striking concept. And on the idea of science, nature, mathematics—allow me to touch briefly on one conceptualization. You could read as many as a hundred novels in a row and not see something described in terms of the spatial relationships of geometry; within the first twenty pages, here, it happens twice. In fact, the very name "Logic" contains endless mathematical associations if read in the sense of, say, Frege. David Harris thinks of himself as a mathematician. And "The rock was no star. It was solid, like problems and mathematicians who could tell the difference between a trapezoid and the insanity of numbers."

Lastly, I think we should give consideration to Vernon's identification of Mississppi; here, she belongs in the great tradition of Southern writers such as Faulkner and Welty, among others. Mississippi is not to be confused with heaven, for sure, but it is just as much a land of myth as ancient Greece or ancient Rome. On these pages, eternal human stories are played out, ringing down through the ages:

Too was a maid and midwife for the folks in Valsin County, Mississippi.

It did not matter, in Valsin County, Mississippi, who a girl belonged to. Neither did it matter that the blood in your body was as hers, light like hers and running away from something, something tainted.

It was July in Valsin County, Mississippi.

Secrets lie dormant in Mississippi. You never know the full truth about anything. There is what your folks choose to tell you and whay you, yourself, discover. One or the other is poisonous, vain.

"Find you some'n God made and love on it. But don't you look back on Valsin County."

No one ever knew what time it was in Valsin County, Mississippi. Perhaps they should have.

These sentences point to a quixotic land of fable; the emphasis on the specificity of locale (why not simply "It was July"; we know where it is) working to point up the status of the place. As universal as the themes and morals strive to be, the story still exists within an identity of place that can only be this place, at this time, if that makes any sense. By making the story particular, it paradoxically grows to be more universal.

Eventually, Olympia Vernon will be spoken about on equal terms with writers like DeLillo or Morrison, as far as outstanding the prose stylists of our time go; her sentences dig the deepest wells within us, create a poetry of quotidian involvement that's a very, very scarce thing in writing of any era. I think what makes Logic so interesting is that it pulls the reader in and pushes her away at the same time, soliciting interpretations or meanings but then refusing to confirm or deny them. This, of course, is a result of following the characters instead of manipulating them, which is a hard level of discipline for a writer of fiction to reach. I think it shows a great respect for the reader, and I think it also probably hints at greater things to come.