If it is true that all novels have one of two plots--someone comes to town, someone leaves town--then C. E. Morgan's slim but stunning debut, All the Living, contains the first, with a twist: someone comes to town, then wanders away emotionally. Aloma, a gifted pianist, joins her sweetheart, Orren, on his Kentucky tobacco farm after a car accident kills his mother and older brother, leaving him alone in the world except for her. Herself orphaned too young ever to have truly loved anyone, Aloma has not learned the painful truth that the beloved is always partly a stranger. Thus Orren's grieving, which alienates him from her, spurs her own retreat from their union: she begins fantasizing about, and flirting with, the pastor at a church where she goes increasingly to play and practice. Gradually she realizes that she, more than Orren, is to blame for their relationship's unraveling and commits to it with a fuller heart.Morgan makes her characters' inner dramas feel real through her painterly, poetic attention to externals; nearly every sentence offers a gem-like detail such as the "fawn brown carapace of the eggs," the wind's "soprano scream," the "first pursing blossoms," or a "hymnal, its leaves shagged by years of use." Her use of nature to symbolize emotions recalls writers of earlier periods, such as Hemingway or Melville. When she translates Aloma's growth into scriptural terms, filtered through the plainspoken but eloquent pastor, she resembles Marilynne Robinson, another female Midwestern novelist, while her serious tone, spare style, and psychological realism connect her to Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri. All the Living is reason for rejoicing among all who prize vivid and insightful fiction.
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