I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows
Henry Holt, 2016
Rae Meadows’ powerful new novel, I Will Send Rain, begins with this paragraph:
Annie Bell awoke in the blue darkness before dawn, her nightdress in a damp tangle at her knees. She’d dreamed about the baby, ten years gone, but all that stayed with her were stray details: the tang of sour milk, a bleating cry she couldn’t soothe. Samuel slept beside her, his hand clenched, his face scrunched into the pillow. She inched away from him and sat up. There had been no rain for seventy-two days and counting. The mercury would climb past a hundred today and no doubt again tomorrow.
Meadows’ novel is successful in all the right ways: good story, unforgettable characters, a historical setting that unfolds organically, etc., and there have already been several reviews to that point.
I want to go a different direction here. Meadows’ prose is good in I Will Send Rain, and I want to attempt to demonstrate what that means. As a writer myself, I often hear that so-and-so is an amazing writer or so-and-so can tell a good story despite not being a good writer.
Good prose is something we talk about but it adds up to much more than pretty and original language. In a novel, good prose also has to do the work of story. And this is something Meadows does so well in I Will Send Rain.
To really make my point I would like to compare the last paragraph of the novel to the first paragraph, but that would spoil some of the plot so I’ll just note that there is an important symmetry between the first and the last paragraph. Like all good novels, the end is present in the beginning. So instead I’ll spend some time talking about the prose in the first paragraph.
Of course the first paragraph of a novel needs to introduce the main character as Meadows does here with Annie Bell. But we get textured details like “blue darkness,” and “her nightdress in a damp tangle,” which tell us a lot. Annie isn’t sleeping well, and it seems she’s been struggling for a while. It’s clearly hot—the damp nightdress—but there is more. We learn in the next sentence that Annie has an emotional wound that is also keeping her up. A lost baby. We don’t know why the infant died, but we know that Annie feels like she “couldn’t soothe” her child.
Next, Meadows introduces us to Annie’s husband, Samuel, who sleeps with his “hand clenched, his face scrunched against the pillow.” Unlike Annie, he is sleeping but it doesn’t sound restful. Note the verbs: clench and scrunch. They are soft rhymes of each other but more than that they pop off the page (and they are not “to be” verbs).
So far we have Annie, who can’t sleep, a baby who cannot be soothed, and a husband who clenches and scrunches. Annie “inches away” from Samuel and sits up. Now we get the big dramatic problem that frames the entire novel: “There had been no rain for seventy-two days and counting.” This conflict drives all the characters’ motives in one way or another, and of course connects to the novel’s kick-ass title: I Will Send Rain.
One reason novel writing is so difficult is because the form is so long. I know that sounds obvious but it’s not said enough: there are a million ways to fuck up a novel. Returning to Meadows’ first paragraph. The practical technical implication of everything in that paragraph is that she cannot repeat it. The novel form demands variability. In other words, she gets one nightdress tangled at the knees, one hand clenched and one face scrunched against the pillow, one sour milk and bleating cry. She can’t reuse these images and words if she is going to maintain the high quality of the prose throughout the book. Which Meadows does.
I Will Send Rain is endlessly inventive at the level of the sentence and paragraph, and rarely gives into easy answers to its own narrative questions. This is good writing, and this is what I spend my time thinking about when I write my own fiction. How do we know what good writing is? One way is to study novels like I Will Send Rain.
