Wash (Wrinkle) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The voices of the past can't speak for themselves and must rely on the artists of the future to honor them. It's a profound responsibility and one that Margaret Wrinkle meets in her brilliant novel Wash. She shows not only the courage to submerge herself in the Stygian world of plantation slavery but also the grace and sensitivity to bring that world to life.... Narrative roles are given to Wash, fellow slaves and his succession of masters, creating a dense, hypnotic ensemble of voices similar to the effect achieved in Peter Matthiessen's momentous retelling of the life of a Florida sugar plantation owner, Shadow Country.... It's from patriarchs like Wash as well as like Richardson, Ms. Wrinkle shows, that the U.S. was born.
Sam Sacks - Wall Stree Journal


Amazing.... Never has a fictionalized window into the relationship between slave and master opened onto such believable territory.... Wash unfolds like a dreamy, impressionistic landscape.... [A] luminous book.
Atlanta Journal Constitution


A lyrical story of courageous human beings transcending the cruelty and degradation of their slave-holding society.
Dallas Morning News


The history of the South provides plenty of tense, complicated material. Even subjects we think we know well can often reveal new stories in the hands of a talented author. Margaret Wrinkle's debut novel Wash is one of those stories.
Jackson Free Press


[A] profound debut novel that takes readers on a journey into a past that left an inevitable mark in America’s history.... Wash is a powerfully haunting tale about the captor and captive. It offers a look at both through their own narrative form expressing their true feeling.
Birmingham Times


Wrinkle has spotlighted a crucial era in the American experience, writing with grace and intelligence.
New York Journal of Books


[Wrinkle] plumbs beyond the brutality and into the wisdom of the ages to compose an elegiac yet surprisingly uplifting portrait of the resilience of the human spirit.... Wash is a solemn and magnificent paean to the survival—even amid the most crushing, inhumane conditions—of the special and eternal essence within every soul.
Shelf Awareness


In this deeply researched, deeply felt debut novel, documentarian Wrinkle aims a sure pen at a crucial moment following America’s War of Independence when the founding fathers yearned to free the country from the tyranny of slavery. At the center of this story stands Revolutionary War veteran Gen. James Richardson and his slave, Wash. Like Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen of Mississippi, Richardson had depended on slaves to “carve out of nothing” a plantation on the Tennessee frontier. Though Richardson had wanted to leave slavery behind, he’s driven by greed and still involved with it, he says, “because I can’t stay out of it.” Imagining that the waves of settlers heading further west will need even more slaves, Richardson studs out Wash to neighboring plantations and fills the region with his visage—not the “R” branded to his cheek by his keepers, but Wash’s “dark eyes that let you fall right inside,” his “thick brows...like wings” and what the midwife who becomes Wash’s lover, Pallas, upon later meeting some of Wash’s biological children, calls, “hat dead on, straight ahead way he had.” Worried that another slave, jealous over whom Wash has been forced upon, might come at Pallas for revenge, Wash says he feels “nailed down in a way I want to pull up from. But it’d take too much skin so I don’t.” Undulating between a lyrical third-person narration and the meditative first-person accounts of Wash, Pallas, and a slowly cracking Richardson, the novel well evokes the tragedy not only of the lovers’ untenable positions, but also that of their master and his fragile country
Publishers Weekly


[F]ilmmaker Wrinkle approaches historical fiction as a documentarian. She reveals fragments of the life stories of her black, white, and biracial main characters—all somehow wounded—who live either as slaves who may have grown up free or as slaveholders who deny any humanity in those they treat as property.... [A] slowly building story of human beings learning to survive as slaves under ambivalent masters. —Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., MA
Library Journal


Heart-rending.... Wrinkle has written a remarkable first novel, one that will haunt readers with the questions it raises, and the disturbing glimpse it offers into an unfathomable world
Booklist


Wrinkle bears witness to the inhumanity of slavery in this chronicle of a Southern family in the early 19th century. Richardson, an American soldier captured during the Revolutionary War, comes out of that experience in debt and unwilling to resume his previous life, so after the war, he begins to acquire several slaves.... Mena, catches his eye, and he purchases her as well. She bears a son, Wash (or Washington), who grows up under Richardson's watchful eye. It becomes a shocking but natural progression for Richardson to analogize breeding farm animals to breeding slaves.... Wrinkle moves us effortlessly through narratives recounted by Pallas, Wash and Richardson, so we get three perspectives on the events.... A moving and heart-rending novel.
Kirkus Reviews