Buried secrets

The granddaughter of a preacher, Susan Gregg Gilmore has been fashioning winsome novels on religious themes for well over a decade, each one set in the South, each one endorsed by southern favorite Lee Smith. They are “book club ready,” as Smith says. Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen (2008) covers recognizable literary territory, mirroring the gentle dramedy of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie. You can see where it comes from and where it is going. Less so with Gilmore’s later works. The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove (2010), about a 1960s Nashville debutante who falls for the Black son of a servant, is surprisingly tart. The Funeral Dress (2013), a more somber story with more deeply imagined characters, draws on what Gilmore knows of the working poor of 
Tennessee.

Now she has written a very curious book-length parable. She is becoming a craftier writer, and this novel is as unpredictable as a parable should be.

Leonard, a 12-year-old boy, has lost his leg to infection. He wants to give it a proper send-off at the family’s hilltop cemetery. A cast of characters assembles for a perfectly awful burial service led by a perfectly awful preacher. “He shall not delight in the strength of the horse,” Brother Puckett reads from Psalms, “nor take pleasure in the legs of a man.”