Body, Mind & Health - Fiction, Christian Fiction & Literature

Sufficient Grace

Name: Sufficient Grace
Author: Darnell Arnoult
ISBN: 9780743284486

by Darnell Arnoult

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Overview

Set against the backdrop of two neighboring Southern towns, Sufficient Grace is the powerful, affecting story of two families over the course of a year, from one Easter season to the next. One quiet spring day, Gracie Hollaman hears voices in her head that tell her to get in her car and leave her entire life behind — her home, her husband, her daughter, her very identity. Gracie's subsequent journey releases her genius for painting and effects profound changes in the lives of everyone around her.

A spellbinding work, Sufficient Grace explores the power of personal transformation and redemption, and the many ordinary and extraordinary ways they come to pass through faith, love, motherhood, art, even food. This poignant, poetic study of the human condition affirms the enduring importance of relationships and the strength we derive from them, even though we sometimes have to leave behind an old identity in order to discover our soul.

Beautifully paced, filled with unforgettable characters, Sufficient Grace reveals the vital place that spirit and belonging have in every inner life — and in the everyday world.

Synopsis

Set against the backdrop of two neighboring Southern towns, Sufficient Grace is the powerful, affecting story of two families over the course of a year, from one Easter season to the next.One quiet spring day, Gracie Hollaman hears voices in her head that tell her to get in her car and leave her entire life behind — her home, her husband, her daughter, her very identity. Gracie's subsequent journey releases her genius for painting and effects profound changes in the lives of everyone around her.

Beautifully paced, filled with unforgettable characters, Sufficient Grace reveals the vital place that spirit and belonging have in every inner life — and in the everyday world.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In her moving debut novel, Arnoult chronicles a Southern middle-aged wife and mother's descent into schizophrenia and the two families-one white, one black-transformed by her. When Gracie Hollaman goes missing, her husband, Ed, is convinced she's left him-but in fact, Gracie has left herself, at the behest of disembodied voices, for a hallucinatory world "[i]n the narrow space between what is real and what is not." Gracie wanders into the small African-American town of Rockrun and is taken into the bustling household of Mama Toot and Mattie, a mother and her widowed daughter-in-law beset by grief. Compulsive and adamant, Gracie clings to painting rituals and the voices in her head, defying her family's attempts to reclaim her after Toot tracks them down: " `My circle's closing. I need to be the ex-wife.' " The circle Gracie refers to finds expression throughout the book-one circle must be closed before another can begin-as each character learns how to say good-bye to her old life and begin anew. In brisk scenes, Arnoult's rhythmic prose beautifully reveals the human potential for unconditional love and faith, and wholly convinces us-despite the heartache her mental illness causes-of Gracie's essential wisdom and worthiness. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Darnell Arnoult

DARNELL ARNOULT was born and raised in Henry County, Virginia. She lived for twenty years in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina, where she received a BA in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and worked at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is also the author of What Travels With Us: Poems, published by Louisiana State University Press and winner of the Appalachian Studies Association's Weatherford Award. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, and she has taught creative writing to adults for over fifteen years. She and her husband live on a small farm near Nashville, Tennessee.

Visit the author at darnellarnoult.com

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Quirky, sympathetic characters propel this finely hewn first novel by Tennessee poet and journalist Arnoult. The author brings together two very different Southern families when white, 50-year-old Gracie Hollaman hears voices and believes Jesus is directing her to leave her middle-class North Carolina home and make her way to Rockrun, Va., the home of her African-American nanny from childhood, Tootsie Mae. Toot and her widowed daughter-in-law Mattie find Gracie unconscious on the grave of Toot's son Arty. Though she doesn't initially recognize her former charge, Toot takes her discovery as a sign from heaven and gives the strange woman the biblical name Rachel. Meanwhile, Gracie's husband Ed, until now scarcely able to cope without his wife to make him deviled eggs, learns to cook rather spectacularly over her many months' absence by watching Chef Bernard on TV. Furious, blameful daughter Ginger opens her own Dixie Donut business and can't fathom why her mother would desert them. In Rockrun, Gracie develops her talent at painting religious scenes on impermanent materials such as car parts. But when Toot finally identifies Gracie from a birthmark, she has to be officially hospitalized and the relatives informed of her whereabouts. We learn from Toot's conversation with the local sheriff that when Gracie was eight, her father committed suicide and her mentally ill mother was sent to a sanitarium. Arnoult knows that her characters take deadly seriously their Christian visions, inner voices, biblical passages and hometown reverend. Her colloquial narrative constantly shifts points of view and skates a fine line between irony and endorsement-or is it proselytizing? Her characters demonstratetremendous grit, especially passionate, hard-edged Toot and once-pitiable Ed, whose growing self-knowledge allows him to minister to the loveless spinster saleswoman of his dreams, Parva Wilson. Ultimately, everyone rushes toward a triumphant spiritual transformation. Deeply felt, though the author's Christian message is sometimes heavy-handed.