Brief Review: The Salt Line (2017) by Holly Goddard Jones

 

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones is an interesting example of the contemporary cross-genre novel sometimes referred to as “slipstream” (though the term hasn’t entirely caught on): it’s a combination of the conventions of sci-fi and of literary realism. Its energetic near-future plot about a U.S. suffering under a long-term contagion of deadly ticks that has altered all large scale social structures is joined to a sophisticated literary style and an interest in developing complex characters.

The tightly plotted narrative is filled with surprising turns, and the dystopian future it pictures feels especially possible post-COVID pandemic, although the book was published in 2017. The sentences are various degrees of elegant, energetic, and brutally raw. And the panorama of characters includes a compelling social, gender, and racial cross-section of the people living in this unpleasant new world.

For me though, the book wasn’t as compelling in the characterizations. The characters seem like they could come from any big futurescape-made-for-the-screen sci-fi epic novel, although one with a prominent and convincing feminist and anti-racist bent. But none of the characters, or the conflicts that motivated them, stood out as especially memorable, and the sometimes long sections that developed them as characters didn’t always seem worth following through. The emotional stakes were convincing enough, and took some startling turns, but none of the people ever jumped that far out of being sci-fi movie-of-the-week action figures.

Of course that points to one of the difficulties with slipstream fiction: making the literary elements as successful as the genre ones, or the other way around. The Salt Line doesn’t quite have what it takes to make it as Ursula K. Le Guin-style crossover literature. It might have been more effective if it had done a bit less with long-winded sections of character development. Sometimes a sci-fi novel should really be just a sci-fi novel.

Still, The Salt Line is unquestionably daring in many ways, and numerous surprises keep the action well worth following.