Kansas author’s novel tells tough, gripping story

As the title suggests, Bryn Greenwood’s novel “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” (Thomas Dunne Books, 379 pages, $25.99) doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of people’s lives. Some terrible things happen to some of the characters, but their lives have bright spots too.

Despite the author being the daughter of a “mostly reformed drug dealer” and the main character being the child of meth dealers, Greenwood said the similarities between the book and her own life pretty much end there.

“I try not to describe it as autobiographical at all,” Greenwood, who lives in Lawrence, said in a recent interview. She said her own father, who at one point had an armed compound out in the country, is “nothing like Wavy’s father” – and her mother was a teetotaler. But some details from her time around her father and his associates show up in her writing, and she also draws on her experience working at a women’s shelter and Planned Parenthood for details and perspective.

Greenwood’s haunting novel centers on Wavonna, or “Wavy,” following her from early childhood in the 1970s through college, as she bounces between her parents and her aunt and uncle, between a world of drugs and sex and lawbreaking and a tidy middle-class neighborhood. Tiny, silent and stubborn, Wavy is also smart, independent and fiercely loyal to those few who have earned her loyalty. One of those few is Kellen, one of her father’s henchmen whom she meets one night when he wipes out on his motorcycle.

Wavy immediately knows Kellen is different, and he somehow recognizes all that is good and worthy in her. He listens, and she talks to him, occasionally, but more than she talks to anyone else. Amid the chaos of her life, Wavy has two anchors: the stars in the sky, which she knows by heart, and Kellen. Greenwood said that Wavy – and anyone in this situation – needed something “reliable, with predictable patterns” that operate no matter how life is going.

However, as Wavy grows up, her relationship with Kellen changes: not unexpectedly, given the nature of puberty and the ideas and images of “love” Wavy has been exposed to. This makes parts of the book a tough read, because it’s obvious that Wavy has agency as a person and neither she nor Kellen is trying to exploit the other, but in the eyes of society – and the law – a stabilizing, grounding relationship in both of their lives has turned inappropriate and illegal.

Greenwood said that for her, “the big issue is listening to people and believing them.” No one believed the children who reported sexual abuse by priests because they didn’t want to hear it, she said, but on the other side, no one wants to believe a child is a willing participant in anything. We as a society say a child can’t give consent, but can we also say a child can expressly not give consent? Greenwood points to another example from the book to illustrate this question: When Wavy’s father forces her to eat, is she allowed to say “no”? This, Greenwood says, is “consent that’s not about sex,” but as a society, we act like consent is only ever about sex, which often results in a lose-lose situation for children.

The situation of Wavy’s relationship with Kellen and her own decisions and desires in it leads to one of the most powerful moments in the book: Wavy is meeting with a judge, who hears her out but isn’t very sympathetic, and after Wavy shows the judge a photo of her family – herself, Kellen and her younger brother – she spots a photo of the judge’s family. Two parents, kids; everyone, we assume, scrubbed and smiling.

“Your family is real, but mine isn’t?” Wavy asks her accusingly. “Real people with real feelings, but my family isn’t … real to you. You think I’m a character. A story. … I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family.”

What gives this scene even more weight is that we get it from the judge’s point of view. Throughout the book, the story unfolds through numerous characters’ perspectives.

“I view nearly everything I write as multiple perspectives,” Greenwood said. Viewing a story through the narrow window of a single character gives the story an agenda, she said, and multiple perspectives get rid of the agenda.

The book is mostly from Wavy’s and Kellen’s viewpoints, but also Wavy’s relatives, some of her father’s associates, and several people “on the periphery” of the story. But it’s the people on the periphery who play a role when someone’s life explodes, Greenwood pointed out, and not always a helpful one.

People “stuck in the social services system get lectured all the time by people who have never been there,” Greenwood said, people who don’t understand the tangled history that led to a current situation. They may mean well, have the best intentions, but a small thing said or done can undermine a person’s happiness in ways they can’t understand. This is why, Greenwood said, Wavy’s Aunt Brenda isn’t the villain, “she’s us”: Brenda is the society that has to make “practical decisions about where to cut our losses.”

What we need to realize, Greenwood said, is that sometimes in life, there are no right answers, but “we all find a way.” It may not be the way others would approve of, but it’s a way for the people involved. Wavy finds a way, finally, and the result is a story that will stay with readers long after the book is finished.

This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Kansas author’s novel tells tough, gripping story."