When police questioned him, the man seemed dazed. He was unable to supply his name, his address, or an explanation for why he was in Jackson. He was arrested for vagrancy. After a few days, he was placed in the custody of Dr. C. D. Mitchell, superintendent of the Mississippi State Hospital. Upon his arrival at the facility, the man, who was estimated to be about sixty, was entered into the patient ledger as “Mr. X.”
Who was he? Where had he come from? How did he wind up alone on a street in the Deep South, at the beginning of the Great Depression, without his memory? Months passed, then years. Mr. X remained at the hospital, and the mystery of his identity lingered. For reasons no one could discern, his past was beyond his reach.
This past year and a half, many of us were relegated to mostly virtual lives, scrolling through our phones and living vicariously through screens. Such was quarantine life during a global pandemic. A few weeks later, the baking frenzy was in full swing. Baking powder and yeast flew off store shelves as quickly as toilet paper and hand sanitizer did a month earlier. I was bombarded with images and videos of people who formerly subsisted on takeout burgers and sushi, now proudly boasting their homemade garden-vegetable focaccia breads, scones, and cupcakes. Self-reliance at its finest, starting in the kitchen.
I also became inspired to try my hand at baking cakes and biscuits. The biscuits turned out hard as rocks and surreptitiously fed to neighboring pigeons, but I wasn’t deterred. In fact, I became even more dedicated and industrious. I decided that I wanted to bake a cake and attempt to decorate it like a professional pastry artist. Amateurs may deal with frosting and measly sprinkles, but I wanted to make something that would be a luxurious feather in my cap: handmade candied lemon and lime slices.
To list everything in play in this novel, including societal drift, ideological cleavage, the nature of truth and fiction, the alienation of families, the ravages of capitalism visited even on those who feel they have some agency in the system, might make “A Calling for Charlie Barnes” sound cluttered. It’s not. Ferris is in shrewd command of his thematic and syntactic trajectories. This novel is a passionate, well-constructed, often hilarious and, at times, profound plunge into grief, both civic and intimate, as well as a culmination (so far) of the literary explorations Ferris has been undertaking since he arrived.
In 2010 the playwright Sarah Ruhl lost her smile. It “walked off my face, and wandered out into the world,” she writes in the opening lines of her new book. Three years earlier, the same thing had happened to me.
This had nothing to do with our dispositions. We were struck with Bell’s palsy, a type of facial paralysis that occurs when the nerves controlling the muscles on one side of the face are damaged or even destroyed. Why? The science is not conclusive — it could be triggered by a virus, hormones or myriad other factors. The result, though, is devastating. Suddenly you’re unable to convey happiness, sadness and other emotions. There are words you can’t pronounce. Ruhl struggled mightily to say her own daughter’s name — Hope — an irony not lost on her. In her thoughtful and moving memoir “Smile,” Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human.