Souls Raised from the Dead

by Doris Betts

Book Overview

Doris Betts returns to the forefront of American fiction with a novel of extraordinary power and poignancy. In a setting that recalls the small towns created by Faulkner, O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and other great Southern writers, Betts etches an indelible portrait of a family.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684801043
• ISBN13: 9780684801049
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 339 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A novel that deserves more attention

I read a lot and enjoy everything from good junk fiction to the western canon. I have recently started reading Elizabeth Spencer's short stories and pick up Souls Raised from the Dead after hearing Doris Betts read a short passage when receiving a literary award for NC literature (from the North Carolina Literature Review). This is what I think of as a naturalistic novel. It is a portrait of ordinary people living through a difficult time. It is true that the emotions of some characters (especially Frank -- the father) are not explored in detail, but then Frank's inability to verbally express emotion is a major focus of the book. He loves his daughter and hovers over her. He is depicted as a good man, but cannot emotionally connect with the two women who comfort him except through what we used to call (quaintly) "making love" which is tastefully depicted. This is not Dostoevsky but it is a venture into the lives of others. I am a North Carolina native and appreciate many of the southern women writers. I preferred this novel to some of those by women who have received far more recognition. I have read and met some of the others (e.g. Jill McCorkle and Lee Smith) and think Souls Raised from the Dead is in the same league as their prose. Betts is not as colorful or as funny as either McCorkle or Smith, but her novel is a realistic view of life and the South.

Really good...

I really liked this book. It was not too sentimental and I thought the characters were very real. It hut my heart and made me angry whenever Mary Grace and her mother were together. I just didn't understand her but the writing was good enough that I finished the book and wanted more. Just a really touching story....

Soul Stirring

A wonderful novel that stirs the emotions with characters that stay on your mind. The writing is crisp but what shines the brightest are the complex and REAL characters in the novel. A novel that is sure to move even the most stoic of readers.

good writing triumphs over unpromising material

I almost gave up on this book after the first 100 pages. After encountering the overprotective father, the plucky but seriously ill daughter, and the narcissistic, self-indulgent mother who had deserted the family two years earlier, the stars seemed in alignment for an overwrought, maudlin tearjerker. Instead, Doris Betts has given us a finely told, thoughtful story about those things we cling to when disaster befalls, especially about the exercise of faith in the absence of any reason to hope. The writing is often superb, as in this observation about the girl's grandmother: "Sex was more important to men than it had ever been to Tacey. Maybe those old Jewish male prophets valued sex so highly it had attained to them the level of sin; she did not, so it had not." Or this, a description of women waiting for their men in the hospital emergency room: "These women wasted no energy by pacing. None of them touched a magazine. They solidified themselves in the first chairs they had taken some time ago, and waited like stones for something external to make them move." Most characters are well-developed; the plot is only moderately suspenseful, but surprisingly compelling nonetheless. I wished that the author had delved more into the inner life of Frank, the main character, and I thought a few plot turns bordered on the implausible. Nonetheless, Betts has done remarkably well telling a story which initially appears unpromising.

The death of a child

Doris Bett's 1994 novel Souls Raised from the Dead is a heartbreakingly sad book. Mary Thompson, age thirteen, lives with her divorced father, both of them having been left by Mary's petty, selfish, but very beautiful mother. Mary develops chronic kidney failure, and her slow demise is wrenching to both the book's characters and this reader. One realizes just how precious children are, and just how unfair life can be (or, to this lucky reader, how fortunate he and his family have been). As I read this novel in the evenings, I found myself going to check on my sleeping daughters, to make sure they were breathing soundly and snug under their covers. The true villain in this book is Mary's mother, who conceivably could have donated a kidney (Mary's father has only one sound kidney), but is too wrapped up in herself and astoundingly selfish to even see the need, let alone its urgency. Despite its highly emotional theme, Betts is not a sentimental writer. I appreciate this. She simply tells her story, and trusts its strength to hold and move the reader. This novel may hit too close to home for some parents; I do recommend it for adolescent readers.