Haynes is a good writer, with a fabulous ear for dialogue, but I'm halfway into this book and I have no interest in continuing to read. There seems to be an idea for a plot, but the story is so meandering that I forget what happened every time I set the book down. ( )

I started this book, but just couldn't get past the first couple of chapters. For me it just had too boring a start and couldn't hold my attention ( )

hard to follow. the idea behind chalktown is cool. ( )

Don’t be surprised if someday very soon you hear the names Flannery O’Connor and Melinda Haynes used in the same sentence. There’s a good chance William Faulkner will be there as well, dancing on the tip of the tongue.

Haynes, whose debut novel Mother of Pearl was chosen by Oprah for her book club, may not yet have the longevity of those esteemed Southern writers, but she’s certainly got a pen that’s been dipped in the same gothic-grotesque ink.

Her sophomore story, Chalktown, is a ripe narrative where the words grow thick as kudzu. If the plot is sometimes as impenetrable as that Southern vine, well then, that’s forgivable because the language is as delightful as a glass of mint julep that you sip while sitting on your porch in the middle of a hot afternoon, beads of condensation sweating down the side of the glass.

Haynes’ fiction-diction is the sort where if you’re not the kind of person to read novels aloud, then by book’s end you will be. Sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs demand that you stop silent-reading, put your finger on the page and declare aloud to the nearest person—even if it’s a complete stranger—“Listen to this.â€? Yes, it’s that good. Even Mr. Faulkner, were he here today, would perk up and nod approval.

The plot follows sixteen-year-old Hezekiah, a poor white boy living in rural Mississippi, as he sets out one day in 1961 to walk to nearby Chalktown. That particular small spot in the road, populated by a handful of scarred and angry people, has taken on an air of mystery ever since the residents stopped talking to each other six years earlier. Now they communicate only by writing messages on chalkboards in their front yards.

Hezekiah isn’t running to Chalktown as much as he is running from his fractured home and its white-trash crazies:
Susan-Blair—his manic-depressive mother, “a formidable woman unraveling at the seams,â€? who believes Jesus watches her from a watermark on the ceiling;
Fairy—his deadbeat father who lives in a bus by the river and whose life is so small “he could climb inside it and disappear;â€?
and Arena—his older sister whose sluttish ways are about to bring tragedy into their lives.
It’s a dead-end life and Hezekiah determines to leave it behind, at least for a day. And so, he straps the other member of his family—his mentally-disabled five-year-old brother Yellababy—to his back and starts walking down “a dirt road going nowhere; a road so still even the dust was speechless.â€?

Watching him go is his neighbor Marion, a colored man who has the gift of “acting stupid while actually being world-class smart.â€? Indeed, Marion is the smartest character in the book, a fact proved by the fact that he mutters at Hezekiah’s retreating back, “Nobody ever really leaves this place. They just fool themselves into thinkin’ they do.â€?

Before Hez reaches Chalktown, however, Haynes takes a sharp detour, leaping ahead to the sparsely-populated town and introducing us to its characters, the kind of outcasts and misfits O’Connor would be proud to claim. I should say, “leaping ahead and back,â€? as the story returns to 1955 when a grisly series of events drove Chalktown into speechlessness. This sudden shift is one of the novel’s problems—perhaps its only problem—as we abruptly lose the sixteen-year-old Hez and only rejoin his journey 100 pages later. Dang, just when we were getting to know him and the pathetic little Yellababy, too…

Even though Haynes wrestles the English language into delicious, doughy knots, the disjointed narrative is disconcerting. Like a broken bone, the two halves never quite knit together and remain bound by the merest ligament, the thin connective tissue of theme and vision: the hard-luck lives of people in desperate need of grace and repair.

But if you’re able to excuse the jarring nature of Chalktown, you’re in for a Southern-fried treat. I mean, who wouldn’t admire sentences like these describing Susan-Blair’s home: “The house itself, if one could even call it a house, was an abomination to the senses. Made up of the strewn guts of other busted-up houses, it sat in a slut-like pose, multi-colored in hues no painter would be likely to claim.â€?

Or, this neat paragraph, a snapshot of small-town residents whiling away the day on a Main Street bench:
“Four of them were sitting there: Johnson, the cuckolded husband of the Eastern Star lady who’d sold those poundcakes; Jim, the one currently doing the cuckolding; J.P. McCreel, whose son had lost his life while between the legs of a female; and Julia Beauchamp, who had never had the stomach for entanglements, but sat wishing for the memory of one to occupy her mind.â€?
Good gracious! There’s an entire novel lurking in the underbelly of that one sentence.

This is Haynes’ gift, the marvelous ability to ferret out the best parts of the English language and to arrange them neatly on the printed page. This is how the dirt-poor speak, this is the music of poverty. Haynes knows her characters and has captured their cadence in ways that might even turn the Old Masters of Southern Lit green around the eyes. ( )