When James Sallis’ engrossing Sarah Jane begins, the eponymous protagonist, Sarah Jane Pullman, has already been through a lot and will endure a great deal more before her story is finished.
Told in an engaging first-person narrative, the novel details her early life on a chicken farm, her deployment to an “all-forsaken foreign desert” war, and her brief marriage to an abusive blowhard. But the bulk of this slim, compelling foray into memory, atonement, and retribution focuses primarily on her accidental employment as a deputy sheriff in a small town in middle America.
Many of her life-altering experiences are the result of fateful encounters. After a run-in with the law, a judge offers her the choice between jail or joining the armed services. In the war zone, she suffers the painful loss of a fellow soldier. Romantic relationships are fractured by partners’ nervous breakdowns or domestic violence.
The unexpected job as deputy sheriff in the rural town of Farr appears to be her salvation. It is the “kind of place that has gingerbread houses shouldered up against modern cookie-cutters, where hardware stores and gas-and-live-bait shops cling to town’s edge, where you hear the whisper of old-country vowels in local speech.” She soon discovers that she has been hired to replace a sheriff who has disappeared, and she is expected to find him. Coming from “good hillbilly stock” where Tennessee meets Alabama has provided her with a fiercely independent spirit that serves her well in her new post.
Much of the novel consists of thumbnail sketches of the routine “quarrel, gritch, [and] grieve” of the rustic community: convenience-store robberies, break-ins, tagging kids, homeless men, and foraging women. Not so commonplace are the characters themselves. Sarah develops friendships with a mentally challenged young man orphaned after the murder of his entire family, a dying widow at the senior center, a teenager who is the caretaker of a much older woman, and several of her staff of detectives.
This last group becomes particularly important when undisclosed elements of Sarah’s past surface and begin to haunt her. The investigator becomes the investigated, even bringing in the FBI.
Sallis has been gone too long. Sarah Jane is an atypical mystery, centering more on characters than crimes. At one point, Sarah concludes that perhaps “we’re all percipient witnesses to our own lives.” Sallis proves once again that he is an acute chronicler of humanity.
