---The AlmondThe Sexual Awakening of a Muslim...

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The Almond

The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman

Nedjma, translated from the French by C. Jane Hunter

Atlantic Monthly Press: 242 pp., $22

It’s a hot one, all right. Once Badra, a beautiful young Bedouin girl, escapes the horrors of her marriage to a crude, brutal man 23 years her senior, sexual awakening is the name of her game. She steps off the train in Tangiers (grateful that the conductor did not send her right back to her nasty in-laws in Imchouk, where her punishment would most certainly be death), and the education begins.

A handsome young man insists on escorting her to her somewhat liberated Aunt Selma’s, falls hopelessly in love and kills himself after a doomed courtship under Selma’s watchful eye. But Driss, a wealthy, handsome, sophisticated playboy/cardiologist (in that order), has better luck. Quite a lot of luck, actually. These two go to it every which way and then again. For 10 years, their passion (unhampered by commitment on his part) consumes them. Badra shakes off her naive country ways and proves an excellent student of love, but also of self-abnegation and the debasement of need. She has exchanged one prison for another.

“My ambition,” writes the pseudonymous Nedjma in the novel’s prologue, “is to give back to the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers, and husbands. In tribute to the ancient Arab civilization in which desire came in many forms, even in architecture, where love was liberated from being sinful, in which both having and giving pleasure was one of the duties of the believer.”

Perhaps the most horrifying part of Badra’s experience was the extent to which the females in her family colluded with and insisted on perpetuating the most humiliating customs: checking to ensure the bride’s virginity, placing a white cloth under the newlyweds to save and show the blood, treating childbearing as a woman’s only important function (besides waiting on her husband). Driss is the physical love of her life, the key to her awakening. But at the novel’s end she is on her own, nearing 50, far more powerful than she was in her youth and at peace with herself. “Men talk, and I hold my fingers against my temples. I wait until they exhaust their word inventory and screw me at length, slowly, and in silence.”

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Crossing Bully Creek

A Novel

Margaret Erhart

Milkweed: 314 pp., $24

Winners of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize are famous for lighting up the dusty crevices, forgotten plains and thorny underbrush of American life and history. “Aquaboogie,” Susan Straight’s connected stories set in Riverside, Calif.; “Hell’s Bottom, Colorado,” Laura Pritchett’s hair-raising tale of ranch life noir; and “Ordinary Wolves,” Seth Kantner’s account of growing up in the Alaskan wilderness are just three of my favorites on the prize list.

The latest winner is “Crossing Bully Creek,” and like her predecessors, Margaret Erhart is forced to just about drag her readers into a truly unpleasant landscape: in this case, the segregated South.

The novel is set on the Longbrow Plantation in southern Georgia -- 11,000 acres owned by a single family, the Northern-born Detroits. The timeline moves from 1929 to 1969, when Henry Detroit, a coal baron and the plantation’s current owner, lies on his deathbed and the world is captured (as in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”) at a moment of deep change.

Life is precarious (as it always was), and the characters try in their various ways to protect themselves and their loved ones. “The people start thinking,” says Lewis Brown, who has worked on the plantation all his life, “and once the people start thinking there won’t be no unthinking. So that day is gonna come. I won’t see it but it’s gonna come.” Erhart’s descriptions of her characters are reminiscent of Jane Austen’s, in their devastating precision (“Rowena Detroit was a small human being who expanded with excitement and shrank with displeasure”).

“Crossing Bully Creek” is a story about how change happens, and about the human habits that spin on and on, like scratched records with a skip, trying in vain to prevent it.