2020: Winter Small Hopes

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Holding On to Nothing

By Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne ’01
Blair

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There are books you read while peeking through your fingers with thudding heart and whispered prayer; books that cause you to talk out loud in public; books you fling across the room, frustrated, then retrieve on your knees, begging for readmittance, because oh! you cannot live without knowing what happens next. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne ’01’s novel Holding On to Nothing is one such book, and the 10 hours I spent reading it cover-to-cover were an emotional rollercoaster of hoping, chiding and a little crying. Most of all, I wanted to hug Shelburne’s characters and save them from their relentless lives.

Jeptha Taylor gave up on himself at age 10, while sneaking a stolen doughnut under a table as kindly church ladies laid out the after-service snack. Listening to them gossip about his family, he realized, “No matter what he did, he’d always be a Taylor” and henceforth set about building himself a name worthy of his family’s terrible reputation.

No one in Jeptha’s Tennessee town has thought of helping him avoid repeating the lives of his grandfather and father. Instead, the town is content to prophesy his doom. We find him in his early 20s as exactly what everyone said he would become: a drunk who cannot keep a job, and a womanizer bent on taking “advantage of the loose morals of any number of girls named Chastity and Honor.” All that is stopping him from going off the cliff is his mandolin, his dog, a tobacco farm and the smile of the girl he has loved since he was 16, Lucy Kilgore.

Lucy is the child the town has decided to save. Orphaned at 14, she is taken in by her mother’s best friend, LouEllen, who steers her toward her parents’ dream for her: escape to college. The whole town wants this for her, too: “She had been chosen as the one who would leave, a vessel for whatever dreams of escape that flitted through their minds from time to time, and then were dismissed as hopeless....”

Now 20 and working at Judy’s bar, Lucy has saved enough to leave. She is halfway through packing up her life when Jeptha walks into the bar for a gig with his band. Lucy has never paid Jeptha more than a passing thought. But on this night, she cannot help smiling at him, or downing free shots of whiskey, or going out back with Jeptha, to his car. The sex is bad, and feels worse when a sobered-up Lucy discovers she is pregnant.

Here are characters riddled with hope, who want so desperately that their wanting turns them inside out. For Jeptha, the pregnancy is a chance to prove himself worthy of the love of his life and to rise above his family name. For Lucy, it offers the family she has wanted since her parents died. But there is so much working against them, and considering it all gave me stomach pains. Dear God, will they make it?

Fiction is the only medium that allows us to step fully into the minds of others and experience their lives firsthand. This is where Shelburne excels, particularly making us deeply empathize with Jeptha as he battles alcoholism. We taste the longing on his tongue, feel the dry thirst in his throat, and it is we struggling not to capitulate as he watches a bead of precipitation roll down a cold can of beer. Our bodies rattle with his withdrawal shakes; we feel the grind of his headaches. We come to hate his naysayers; we want to wring him of his self-doubt and nudge him across the novel’s pages toward the good decisions we know he can make, if only, if only... We know he is a terribly flawed man, even a bad man, but Shelburne’s deep dive into his psyche makes it difficult for us to judge him. Shelburne makes us struggle as he does.

He set about building himself a name worthy of his family’s terrible reputation.”

With such a strong talent for characterization, Shelburne could have achieved more for this endearing novel by similarly illuminating the rest of her characters. Lucy is not quite as complicated as Jeptha. And what a treat it would have been to examine some of the events of this novel through the eyes of Deanna, Jeptha’s vicious sister, or LouEllen, who seems bent on controlling Lucy’s pregnancy. Not tapping into these voices was a missed opportunity.

While Holding On to Nothing tackles a difficult topic, it is far from the dreary trudge through hell that it could be, considering the characters’ circumstances. Shelburne weaves into her story the humor, music, camaraderie and pride of the American South. She thus succeeds in creating a moving debut novel that provoked in me uncomfortable, but necessary, questions about the influences of nurture, accident, choice and environment on who or what we become. This is what great fiction does, I think: it makes us more deeply examine ourselves and our assumptions about others.

Onjerika, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, facilitates the Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop.