The opening paragraph of Jennifer Clement’s novel sings with the unabashed sticky-gorgeous sentiment of a good country song: “My mother was a cup of sugar. You could borrow her anytime.” The narrator is 14-year-old Pearl, who lives with her cup-of-sugar mother in an old car with four flat tyres in a trailer park in rural Florida. As the book opens, there’s trouble brewing, because “sweetness is always looking for Mr Bad and Mr Bad can pick out Miss Sweet in any crowd”. Mr Bad duly arrives, in the person of Eli, who “wore a hat even if it was the middle of the night. In Eli’s world the moon burned hotter than the sun.” With Eli come the guns of the title, and soon Pearl’s world is turned inside out.
Throughout the novel, Clement maintains the intoxicating potency of the language. Gun Love is reminiscent of gushing lyrics you can imagine singing in the throes of crazy grief. Clement also deftly works in phantasmagoric touches reminiscent of books such as Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; this is a world of Native American ghosts and 12-legged lizards, where a lovesick girl buries her vast collection of Barbies waist-deep in her yard to express despair, and cached guns speak to Pearl in her sleep, telling the stories of their crimes. All sad women are psychic here. All love is at first sight.
In addition to being an author, Clement is a free speech activist (notably the president of PEN International), and her most recent novel, Prayers for the Stolen, focused on human trafficking in Mexico, so one might expect Gun Love to have a political edge. In fact, the few political notes are tangential to the plot. Instead, Clement maintains a high romanticism, which sometimes threatens to turn into cheesiness. For instance, she makes the narrator’s mother a very rich girl who ran away from home and is too proud to ask her father for money. Meanwhile, Pearl is so freakishly white and blond that on various occasions people ask her whether she is albino. Here, one can’t help being reminded of narratives about the children of aristocrats, lost among the unwashed masses, children whose highborn ancestors or white skin (as in Kipling’s Kim) are enough to indicate that they are special.
Still, for the most part the trailer park feels like a real trailer park, the poverty feels like real poverty, and we’re willing to accept that Pearl and her mother drink their tea from Limoges china because it’s so deliciously camp. The book also seems to be heading towards a magical realist treatment of trailer-park life and gun culture, which has the potential to be fascinating.
But in the second half, Clement leaves the trailer park behind. Most of the characters disappear, and are replaced by new, less convincing ones. Some are implacably malevolent, such as the Child Protective Services officer who sneers at a newly orphaned child: “Why are you so quiet? Huh? You deaf? You’re funny-looking and you don’t talk? You don’t even cry for your mama? I’m not seeing any wet tears on your face.”
Others are improbably saintly, such as the elderly man who, we are told, won’t mind that a foster child stole his family heirlooms, because “When he’d taken me into his home, he said he was a Jew and that Jews understood foster kids better than anyone else.” When a woman is menaced by a deranged man with a gun, instead of being alarmed, she states fatalistically, “You’re going to shoot me. I understand this is what’s going to happen.” When a man’s business partner is murdered, he uncomplainingly takes responsibility for disposing of the body; the reason given for this remarkable helpfulness is that he “does not give that much importance to life”.
The strangeness of these episodes can be striking in isolation, but after a long series, the effort of suspending disbelief becomes too great. We also gradually lose the sense of Pearl as a human being. She becomes a stylised representation of a lost child, a vehicle for pathos. Sometimes the prose slips into the mawkishness that is the great attendant hazard of lyricism. When Clement tells us sombrely that “foster children don’t wave goodbye”, we’ve arrived in the land of kitsch.
Despite these problems, the inventiveness and charm of Clement’s narrative voice are such that Gun Love never stops being a pleasure to read. Every paragraph is nutty and passionate and glamorous, and there’s even something winningly vulgar about the way the plot treats serious topics – poverty, the illegal gun trade, the shortcomings of the foster care system, Mexican drug cartels – as a backdrop for melodrama. Even in the weakest sections of the narrative, there are moments of gritty magic. It’s a cup of sugar and a great pop ballad. That’s more than enough to make the book both readable and fun. It isn’t quite enough to make us care.
• Sandra Newman’s The Heavens is published in May by Granta. Gun Love is published by Vintage (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
