Same Blood is an intriguing first novel by a relatively new writer, but it is not an easy one. In fact, after two readings I'm still not sure what it's really about.

The story is told by a naive narrator, a semi-literate young woman who lives in a small town in the Catskills. She becomes pregnant and has a son, whom she names Bubby. She delivers the baby herself and proceeds to raise him by herself. About three years later, Bubby, who has many of those same nature-child qualities Hawthorne gave to Pearl in The Scarlet Letter , dies of an unexplained hole in his stomach, which seems to have been a congenital condition. From there the story gets strange, and not a little difficult to follow. The story line itself is clear enough: it is a narrative about the three years of Bubby's life and the grieving time thereafter, which the girl, Margaret, addresses to her dead father. The difficulty comes in trying to determine what the point is.

One of the major plot lines, which is introduced very early, involves what Margaret calls "switching over." This thread has to do with seeing through the eyes of another creature--literally, by some effort of concentration, sending one's consciousness into the mind of, for instance, a cow or a bear. Soon it becomes obvious that Margaret has unconsciously done this with Bubby: she develops a constant pain in her stomach, which is really his pain. Her taking his pain keeps everyone from realizing that he is ill and he dies of his undetected stomach trouble. But he dies within a day of Margaret's being forced to take a hormone shot that dries up her milk and forces her to wean the three year-old Bubby.

So far so good. However, it never becomes clear why this plot line exists. Later in the story, Margaret and Doro, another strange young woman, use this same power to relieve Beulah of her cancer, which they all refer to as "The Bull." From this, it seems that the story is making some point about womanhood, motherhood, nurturing and mysticism, but I can't figure out exactly what. And I think that is Blakeslee's fault rather than my own, a weakness in the novel.

Still, it is a good novel, compelling. Blakeslee draws her characters well, even the minor ones. She has a good eye for the telling detail, weaves her themes well, and uses language well. Margaret, for instance, speaks an uneducated idiom that, I think, must have been extremely difficult for Blakeslee to sustain. But sustain it she does, and admirably. One characteristic of this language is frequent "homey" comparisons; here, too, Blakeslee does a fine job. It would have been easy, I think, to have slipped in figurative language such a character just wouldn't have used. She doesn't, though. She pays attention to her details.

The story deals with pain, loss, despair, frustration, and, saddest of all, limited horizons--the painful, human parts of life. It pits, for example, a naive, uneducated, ignorant, young mother, who is full of fears and superstitions, against a bureaucratic social service system, and shows her lose to the system. So universal are the characters and the conflict that it could just as easily have been set in the Appalachian mining country, the Louisiana bayous, an Eskimo village, or the Ozark hills, where these throwaway humans daily struggle through their desperate lives. So much for safety nets.

A good novel, but puzzling. I recommend it.

Jim Vandergriff is an English Instructor at SMSU