Southern man
A teen's journey to maturity in America's swampy South casts a dark light on the consumerist, polluting and greed-laden oil business near the Gulf of Mexico.
April 17th, 2025
Jill Yonit Goldberg teaches literature and creative writing at Langara College.
Reviewer Susan Sanford Blades says that Jill Yonit Goldberg’s entire novel “acts as a comment on the patriarchal southern United States.”
Review by Susan Sanford Blades
Set in a “four-room shack with … rotting wood and peeling paint” in the swampy middle-of-nowhere, Louisiana, be prepared to read about human misery in Jill Yonit Goldberg’s debut novel, After We Drowned (Anvil $22).
The story begins during the 1980s, several months after the oil rig that fifteen-year-old Jesse’s father, Emmett, worked on as a roughneck exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. That job had been a saving grace for Emmett; the first time he could provide for his family. As Jesse laments on the first Christmas after his father got that job, “for once I felt like we were a regular family.” The rig’s explosion, Emmett’s job loss, and the questionable role he played in his coworker’s death, has left Emmett angry, abusive and drunk, “like a man who didn’t know how to be alive anymore”—not to mention destitute.
What follows is Jesse’s quest to become not only a man, but a Southern man. In order to do so, it seems he needs to please and, perhaps even more difficult a task, understand his father, who drops in and out of his life throughout the novel. On the very first page, Jesse tells us, “I’m not the son my father wants.” Ostensibly, this is because he is a virgin who is not “obsessed with killing things.” After his father suddenly leaves the family, Jesse makes a series of failed attempts at providing for his Mama and younger sister, Willow Rose. Any time Jesse takes a step forward, he’s pushed two steps backward. Throughout the book, Jesse makes no headway in dealing with the same abusive in-and-out father, the same depressed mother, the same headstrong sister, the same terrorizing boss. And all of the abuses and setbacks the family suffers are blamed on Jesse.
The entire novel acts as a comment on the patriarchal southern United States. Being a Southern man purportedly entails taking responsibility for the bad things that happen to one’s family but, rather than righting these wrongs, a Southern man behaves like a dog who’s peed on the good carpet—he runs away to hide and self-destruct. Yonit Goldberg offers a few chapters written from Emmett’s point of view, which were actually my favourite chapters of the novel. Here, we see beneath his angry exterior and gain some insight into how what happened on the rig has misshapen him. He tells us he was happy as a roughneck, distracting himself by working hard and drinking, but realizes, “a man can’t escape himself.” I wish we’d been given a hint as to what problems previous to the explosion Emmett was trying to escape so we could gain deeper insight into the psyche of this book’s patriarch.
Jesse and his family’s miserable existence is also a comment on the consumerism and greed that encompass the oil business, and how it is destroying our world and all of us. Due to “all that dredging for oil,” the bayou’s waters increasingly encroach on those not wealthy enough to live on higher ground. “Everything’s going to drown here someday,” Jesse’s uncle PJ’s friend tells him. The oysters that used to keep PJ fed and housed are now all sick and inedible, drenched in oil.
There is a bit of light in this book. Its chapter headings, for instance, are named after song titles from the 80s. This adds a sense of fun, and they do work in that the content of the chapter relates to its title, but they would’ve been even more meaningful had music served as an escape for Jesse, or played a more central role in his life rather than only being mentioned in the background of the novel. I also very much enjoyed a playful moment Jesse and Willow Rose shared, mimicking Tammy Faye Bakker on television one Christmas day, and the other mentions of 1980s culture, like a “Let’s Make America Great Again” mug featuring Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.—Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was the first time that slogan was used. There are also some lovely images in the beginning of the novel, for instance when Jesse’s mother “smiles in a way that feels like a little piece of glass in [his] heart.”
We read in order to broaden our worlds and, if they can steel themselves against the endless punishment thrown at its characters, After We Drowned will certainly transport any BC-based reader into a completely different world. 9781772142273
Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood) in 2020.
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