Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction
So emphatic is Melissa Fay Greene that Praying for Sheetrock is a work of nonfiction that she includes the phrase as a part of the title. Perhaps she feared that her use of novelistic techniques might lead the reader astray into believing that the stories she tells, the history she recounts, are imagined or distorted. Without resorting to journalese, she employs some of the reporter's tricks to make her work more immediate: background stories, anecdotes of local color, repetition, and just enough narrative tension to push her tale forward. Consciously or subconsciously, she absorbs and uses to great effect some of the techniques Truman Capote developed for In Cold Blood (1966). She re-creates conversations without unnecessary asides and, more important, in the language she heard in McIntosh County. This skillful use of dialect establishes character in ways that expository description could not.
Her own narrative voice is distinctive, assured, often poetic, as in her introduction to the place about which she writes: "McIntosh County, on the flowery coast of Georgia-small, isolated, lovely." She never forgets that it is home to the men and women, black and white who help tell her story. She says, "If the Messiah were to arrive today, this cloudless, radiant county would be magnificent enough to receive Him." Its beauty, however, is deceptive. The grinding poverty of its residents is all too real and ugly, and, until recently, the corruption so pervasive that the county's name was synonymous in the state with good-old-boy political chicanery. For example, one of the effective ploys to keep the black citizenry in line was to allow them to plunder wrecked transport trucks on busy U.S. 17.
From the aftermath of just such a wreck, the book gets its title, and for a people as dependent on miracles as on the economy to get by, God took on the epithet of "Sheetrock- Deliverer." Finally one man, a disabled black boilermaker named Thurnell Alston, decided his community could
Her own narrative voice is distinctive, assured, often poetic, as in her introduction to the place about which she writes: "McIntosh County, on the flowery coast of Georgia-small, isolated, lovely." She never forgets that it is home to the men and women, black and white who help tell her story. She says, "If the Messiah were to arrive today, this cloudless, radiant county would be magnificent enough to receive Him." Its beauty, however, is deceptive. The grinding poverty of its residents is all too real and ugly, and, until recently, the corruption so pervasive that the county's name was synonymous in the state with good-old-boy political chicanery. For example, one of the effective ploys to keep the black citizenry in line was to allow them to plunder wrecked transport trucks on busy U.S. 17.
From the aftermath of just such a wreck, the book gets its title, and for a people as dependent on miracles as on the economy to get by, God took on the epithet of "Sheetrock- Deliverer." Finally one man, a disabled black boilermaker named Thurnell Alston, decided his community could