One Mississippi, Two Mississippi

Arts Locale - September 2024

Pass Christian Books will host the Mississippi Book Festival kick off on September 12, 2024 at 6:30 pm. Join us in celebrating the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the literary excellence inspired by our beautiful home. Barb Johnson, writer and editor of Bayou Magazine out of New Orleans, will whet your appetite with her review of Minrose Gwin’s Beautiful Dreamers.
 
- By Barb Johnson

The setting for Minrose Gwin's novel, Beautiful Dreamers, is the fictional town of Belle Cote a small town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, much like Bay St. Louis.

Minrose Gwin’s Beautiful Dreamers is a novel about a newly divorced mother, Virginia Feather, and her daughter, Memory (Mem), who in 1953, leave their life in Albuquerque and return to Belle Cote, the small town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast where Virginia grew up. 

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There, her lifelong friend, Mac, provides physical and social refuge and some much-needed relief from the constraints of small-town life. Mem tells the story as a grown woman, a biologist now, looking back.
 

 
In Belle Cote, neither Mem, nor her divorced mother, nor their gay friend, Mac, are accepted by the town, which doesn’t much bother Mem. She is quite happy with her little family of misfits, buoyed by the love and security that Mac and her mother provide. Just when she thinks things couldn’t be better, along comes the beautiful and charming Tony Amato to be Mac’s dreamy lover. And it is Tony who will light the fuse of a powder keg of betrayal that only the cat knows they’re sitting on.
  
One night well into Tony’s erratic tenure in the household, Mem is waiting up for him and her mother, who have been out very late. She’s trying to piece together the truth about their relationship. Truth, in general, is difficult to come by at this point, and Mem is looking for signs of something, though she’s not sure what.
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I got out the cards and played two games of solitaire. Minerva [the cat] appeared in the open window above the kitchen sink and jumped up on the table beside me. In the middle of the third game, my mother and Tony tumbled in the door, both of them flushed and laughing full out.

Minerva hissed, leapt for the window, and disappeared into the night.

Unlike the other characters, who are smitten with the gorgeous, charming Tony, the reader, like the cat, like anyone standing on the outside, quickly senses Tony’s duplicity, the danger of his company. The task of figuring out exactly what is real and what is not takes the entire novel to complete, and this makes for a tense, satisfying plot packed with reversals.
 

Some of Minrose Gwin's editing notes from her novel, Beautiful Dreamers.

 
Those familiar with coastal Mississippi will recognize the location of the fictitious Belle Cote for its proximity to Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian. New Orleans and the French Quarter also play a pivotal role here, as the members of the crumbling family visit the Quarter in various combinations to be who they cannot be in the oppressive Belle Cote.
 
In New Orleans there is music and dancing, oysters, and cocktails at the rotating bar of the Monteleone Hotel. But it’s not all fun and games in New Orleans. At one point, Mem and her mother are walking back to their hotel with Mac and some of his (gay) friends when a carload of men (friends of the deeply closeted Tony?) chases them, trying to run over and shoot them.
 
What was unexpected and deeply delightful in this novel, though, are the meditations that Mem has concerning the natural and human history of the Mississippi Sound. When asked, “What are your enthusiasms?” Mem launches into a description of her interactions with the natural world:
 

[She tells them about her] daily conversations with the ditch frogs and cottonwoods and guinea hens… the ghost-faced bats that made their homes under the rafters at the El Camino…the leaf-nosed mice that chewed their way under our bathroom sink until my mother stoppered it with steel wool… the western diamondback rattlesnakes, from which I kept my distance, not knowing how close a person could get without their taking umbrage. 

 
So, not your typical kid, Mem. Nonetheless, her enthusiasms serve to keep the social and environmental volatility of the Gulf Coast front and center in the reader’s mind.
 
This is, in many respects, an ecological novel. Gwin subtly capitalizes on the inherent similarities between being emotionally and ecologically vulnerable. Forming a powerful backdrop for this tale of betrayal is the flora and fauna of an area susceptible to the threats of hurricanes and flooding and the rapid loss of coastline, and thus the loss of the species who inhabit those places.
 
Add to that environment four outsiders, organisms like any other, thriving and then going extinct, plagued by relationships that look like commensalism but turn out to be parasitism.
 
Toward the end of the book, a grown Mem wonders, How much behavior is learned? How much embedded in the DNA structures, the silent tick-tock that makes up the creature? This is a work that deftly combines a page-turning plot about civil rights, love, longing, and betrayal with an examination of life’s larger questions.

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Barb Johnson’s work has appeared in such magazines as Guernica, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, and Oxford American, as well as in a number of anthologies, including The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans. She is the author of the award-winning short story collection, More of This World or Maybe Another and teaches fiction writing in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans, where she is the editor-in-chief for Bayou Magazine.

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