Call shotgun if need be, but read ‘Backseat Saints’

In the first chapter of “Backseat Saints,” Rose Mae Lolley shoots her dog. But that was an accident; she had intended to shoot her husband, on the advice of a gypsy she met at the airport.

I don’t know if you’d characterize it as Southern lit or chick lit, but the work of Joshilyn Jackson is genius, and she proves it again with “Backseat Saints.”

Rose Mae, a minor character in Jackson’s first book, “Gods in Alabama,” is the heroine in this, the author’s fourth novel. In “Backseat” — the title refers to the helpers Rose Mae, who was raised Catholic, summons to assist her through particularly difficult times — she has fled her hometown of Fruiton, Ala., in search of herself and the mother who disappeared in order to survive her abusive husband when Rose Mae was a child.

Rose Mae has moved from town to town, traveling west across the South, fleeing serial abusive relationships along the way. In Amarillo, Texas, she has reinvented herself as the more demure Ro and vowed to be a good wife to Thom Grandee, scion of a gun shop-owning family. Thom’s a great, loving husband — except for his little habit of knocking her around now and then. The gypsy convinces her that she has to escape if she’s going to survive, and that there’s only one way that can happen.

The gypsy character is a thread that winds through Ro’s life as it progresses through the book. At times she seems like a product of Ro’s imagination; then Ro becomes convinced that the gypsy is her mother, which seems to be a truly impressive feat of the imagination. There’s lots and lots of color and many pilgrimages along the way. Ro goes to the Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo because she’s convinced the gypsy left her a message there. She decides to search for Jim Beverly, the high-school love who also vanished (if you’ve read “Gods in Alabama,“ you know how that will end), so she goes to Chicago to find her only connection to Jim, Arlene Fleet, another vintage Jackson character. And, almost against her will, she searches for her mother.

To say any more would be to give away too much of Jackson’s book. Suffice it to say Ro does eventually find Rose Mae Lolley.

Although not reading Jackson’s earlier works would in no way diminish a reading of “Backseat Saints,” it’s something I heartily recommend. Although abusive relationships are a common thread in the author’s books, she uses the finely honed sense of irony and the absurd that characterize the best Southern novelists to not only give faces to a very important issue, but to do it in a most entertaining way.