Each of the diverse neighbors on Orchid St. in New Orleans, the ones populating Amanda Boyden's Babylon Rolling, is completely fascinating: sweet Cerise, who has lived there all of her long life; Philomena, the decaying but loyal blueblood housewife; newly arrived northerner, Ariel, and her husband, Ed; and self-titled Fearius, a teenage boy fresh out of juvenile hall.
Boyden artfully uses changes in tone, grammar, and vocabulary to signal to the reader when she's switching from one perspective to another. It's soon obvious that housewife Philomena "twinkles around her kitchen on her toes" as "peach cobbler and peach upside-down cake cool on the counter," while teenage Fearius "walk slow down the block and think on things," trying not to "look like no baby with his thumb in his mouth."
It's a good time getting lost in the lives and thoughts of the intriguing characters Boyden gives us in Babylon. Such deep immersion really shows off her skill as an author: She's able to create five protagonists so completely that, from the very beginning, you don't doubt you're getting right into their heads, that they're made up of more than what's on the page.
But beneath the superficial sentence structure, Boyden also reveals each character's thoughts and reactions so specifically that you really know them by how they think and what they feel, their thought processes and values, even more than how they talk or what they talk about. When we watch one of the characters walk off the approved path of a golf course to a pond where she "bends down and tips [a] turtle out onto the mud by the edge" and then "watches the tiny thing for a while until it pokes its head and quick claws down into the water," there's no mistaking it's dear Cerise who's guiding us on a small journey.
The only obviously disappointing thing in the novel is Boyden's use of setting. The residents on Orchid St. come alive, but New Orleans itself doesn't play a major role. Boyden uses typical things about the city to drive the plot (a hurricane is coming, so maybe we should evacuate; or it's Mardi Gras this weekend, so there will be lots of drunk college kids around), but for a reader unfamiliar with the area, the Big Easy doesn't come to life. The characters refer to different parts of the city and claim to love or hate it, but there's no deep reason why. The reader can't see why it's important that these characters are in this place, and how their surroundings affect them. Boyden uses an intriguing city as not much more than a backdrop to tell a story that could be recreated almost anywhere.
While she doesn't take full advantage of the common ground of New Orleans, Boyden links her characters by throwing them into tough but familiar situations together. Probably no one reading the novel has gone through the accident that Boyden uses to set the novel's stories into action, but almost everyone can think of a time they saw something like it. While Philomena "steps carefully across the street in her mules" after she has "waited patiently" for the commotion to subside, Ariel feels as if "tectonic plates have shifted inside her skull."
Throughout all of this, the novel raises lots of life's unanswerable questions: Does wisdom only come with age? Is forgiveness possible? Who's a hero? How do you measure sanity? What makes something tragic? But, to her credit, Boyden doesn't attempt to answer them, even when her characters do. For each situation, there's always a history, stuff that no one else can see. At the same time, she doesn't excuse terrible behavior or explain it away. All of her characters suffer at times, some because they should, others because they have to, and some just because. But even though she wrote it, Boyden masterfully makes it feel like it's not up to her, or anyone really, to decide. Refreshingly, she leaves some things a little messy. Which is just how some things should be.