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South African Tragedy: Who Killed Piet Barol?

17 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: Who Killed Piet Barol?, by Richard Mason
Knopf, 2016. 362 pp. $28

Despite the title, this remarkable novel is no whodunit, unless you take the death implied in the title as a more symbolic accusation, in which case we’re all guilty.

Now that I’ve confused you thoroughly, let me explain. Piet Barol, last seen in The History of a Pleasure Seeker making his way in Amsterdam through roguish charm, has broadened his horizons and his debts. Styling himself a French viscount, he’s living large in Cape Town with his American wife, Stacey, a former opera singer blessed with charm and diplomatic cunning more than equal to his own. But the Barols’ furniture business is failing, partly because Piet can’t bring himself to collect what he’s owed, but mostly because they spend money they don’t have to keep up appearances. Things look desperate, especially as the year is 1914, and Europe plunges into war, which puts Piet in a bind. Had he represented himself truthfully from the get-go as a Dutch national, he’d be in the clear, since the Netherlands remains neutral. But as a French aristocrat, surely he should be fighting for la patrie?

The South African Native National Congress delegation to the British Parliament in 1914 tried unsuccessfully to reverse colonial land policy (courtesy historywiz.com)

So it’s altogether convenient that he disappear for awhile, and when he hears that there’s a forest full of high-quality wood available for the taking, he sees how he can restart his furniture business with practically no overhead. However, to find the wood and remove it, he must hire two Xhosa men, Luvo and Ntsina; and therein hangs a tale.

First of all, this is no ordinary forest, but one dating from the time of Jesus, fecund in its density:

The grove was almost a single being, so bound were its member trees to one another, and yet each was wholly individual. They had grown together from saplings and forged a union without conflict, free from betrayal and viciousness. In their crowns were gardens of fertile soil, several inches deep, dropped over centuries by passing birds. In these gardens earthworms wriggled, grown distinct from those that churned the forest floor. Their branches began thirty feet above the ground, and this refuge from predators made them desirable residences for all sorts of creatures that relished distance from the great cats.

The forest represents a society of interdependence, in other words, a metaphor for that which white colonists have set about destroying among the Bantu peoples whose land they have stolen. More specifically, the noblest trees serve a religious purpose for the Xhosa, who believe their ancestors reside within them, whereas Piet doesn’t even know that the trunks are as old as Christianity.

But Mason, who managed to make Piet a sympathetic character as an Amsterdam imposter, does so here as well. Not only does Piet befriend Luvo and Ntsina in a true sense and grow to trust them, he lets himself see things from their perspective and corrects his behavior accordingly. He also entrusts his young son, Arthur, to them so that the boy can learn the ways of the forest, which Piet correctly judges will help him grow into a man. That said, Piet nevertheless sets out to take the Ancestor Trees, and though he fully intends to compensate Ntsina and Luvo for the loss, he’s a plunderer. And his failure to stand up to Stacey, especially where his African associates are concerned, makes him a weakling.

Then again, the degree to which he comes to love and understand life in the wild frees him from many prejudices. It also releases the artist in him, so that the furniture he carves adopts African themes and is absolutely gorgeous. Morever, Mason takes care to show the village politics among the Xhosa, many of whom, in their own way, are just as rapacious as the colonials.

But in the end, you know that all this will go wrong, that the scale of destruction the white men wreak will be far greater than that of the black, and that only one side will profit. That systematic destruction answers the question of the title, and that’s why I said we’re all guilty for condoning or participating in the crime. But how Mason arrives at this conclusion makes a fine tale, and that he renders the Xhosa in ways that ring true is no accident. For a year, he lived among them in a tent, learning their language and culture, and establishing a center for green farming. Who Killed Piet Barol? is a worthy result, a wide-ranging discussion of morals and racial tensions, and a pretty good yarn besides.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Too Much Conscience?: The Second Mrs. Hockaday

13 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers
Algonquin, 2017. 254 pp. $26

After her half-sister’s wedding in rural South Carolina, seventeen-year-old Placidia Fincher makes a bold decision. She accepts a marriage proposal from Major Gryffyth Hockaday, a widower considerably older than herself, whom she has never met before and to whom she has spoken but briefly during the wedding reception. Over the next two days, Placidia has cause to wonder whether she made a mistake but also a sense that her heart has led her to her true love. Unfortunately, she has no time to figure out which, for the year is 1863, and the Civil War claims his attention. Recalled to his regiment sooner than anticipated, Major Hockaday leaves his bride in a perilous, unsettled situation. She must put aside her fears that he may be killed at any moment; raise his young son by a previous marriage; manage their farm, something she has never done; and face various threats to which she’s particularly vulnerable, as a young woman, alone.

What a splendid premise, and what a strong way to begin a novel. However, that’s not how Rivers approaches her narrative. Rather, she picks up the story from the major’s return from war in 1865, whereupon he discovers that Placidia has given birth to a child that couldn’t possibly be his, and that the law has charged her with murdering the infant. This is a pretty good premise too.

The Confederate flag flies over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 1861, from Alma A. Pelot’s stereoscopic photograph (courtesy Bob Zeller via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Nevertheless, about halfway through its short narrative, The Second Mrs. Hockaday goes wrong for me, despite having so much in its favor. I confess that I dislike epistolary novels, but that’s not my problem here; Rivers handles the form expertly, using letters, diary entries, and legal depositions to advance the plot. I also admire her prose, which captures Placidia’s voice beautifully, as when she dances with Hockaday at her half-sister’s wedding:

His hands were calloused and he held me at a distance in the way Abner [a slave] holds a fresh coonskin–like he was fixing to nail me to a shed before the smell made his eyes water. . . .He was telling the truth when he said he was a poor dancer and he was so tall I had to tilt my head back to see his jaw and his Adam’s apple while we danced. But as the music ended he guided me into the alcove in the dining room where his left hand slid down my back while his right hand pulled me to his side. I stumbled. He smoothly righted me with his hands on my waist. Didn’t I tell you I was clumsy, I said, and I must have been blushing because I fancied my hair was on fire.

Rivers further excels at creating a wartime ambience, based on painstaking research and telling detail. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and Major Hockaday’s Thirteenth South Carolina Regiment fights with stalwart pride, but the landowners she portrays strike poses while shirking their contribution to the cause. Deserters pretending to gather supplies for the army rob the countryside blind, and Placidia suffers their depredations.

So where’s the beef? Simple: Rivers gives the game away too soon. The reader sees how the case against Placidia will go, and though the why comes later, to me, that’s disappointing. I wish the author had let the crime and the mystery surrounding it hold center stage throughout. But maybe that’s the drawback of the epistolary style, whose very economy, though it drives the narrative at a good clip, undoes any chance to linger or spread out, so that the resolution comes too quickly.

But Rivers has something else in mind too, and that’s where I begin to lose confidence. Slavery gets a light touch here; too light, in my opinion. The racial divide tinges the narrative but doesn’t infuse it, as if Placidia were holding it at arm’s length, much as Hockaday held her during their first dance. And yet, this is the Civil War. Brutality against slaves occurs, but, with one exception, never at her hands (and she regrets it as an economic necessity). It’s always someone else, somewhere else, who supports the evil institution and will kill to preserve it, whereas Placidia, and the people she loves, at times sound like 1960s liberals, working for change.

Not only do I find this hard to believe, I see only the feeblest connection between this narrative and the crime of which Placidia stands accused. No doubt, it must be uncomfortable to write a novel in which otherwise good people are slaveowners, and I understand the urge to redeem them. But Rivers would have convinced me more readily had she not bothered and let the main story, which needs no adornment, carry The Second Mrs. Hockaday.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

East African Gothic: Leopard at the Door

06 Monday Mar 2017

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Review: Leopard at the Door, by Jennifer McVeigh
Putnam, 2016. 385 pp. $26

Ever since her mother died, and her father sent her to live with her grandparents in England, Rachel Fullsmith has dreamed of returning to Kenya, where she was born. Now, at age eighteen, against her father’s advice, she has spent her meager savings for her passage to Mombasa. As Rachel quickly learns, she finds hostility rather than fond memories of what she loved as a child.

That hostility comes in two forms, personal and political. The year is 1952, and the independence movement known as Mau Mau has been gathering force. Thus far, the Mau Mau have refrained from attacking white residents, though they have murdered and mutilated Africans who refuse to swear their loyalty oath. But as the violence and British countermeasures ratchet up, Rachel will have excruciating choices to make.

A detachment of the King's African Rifles, on patrol against Mau Mau forces, ca. 1952-56 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

A detachment of the King’s African Rifles, on patrol against Mau Mau forces, ca. 1952-56 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As the opening scenes make clear, the instincts her mother taught her stress compassion toward fellow humans over race loyalty and its inherent prejudice. Right off the boat, she’s delighted to realize that she still speaks good Swahili, and that the port of Mombasa looks and feels like heaven, despite the filth and bad smells. Her father’s Kikuyu foreman, who meets her and drives her upcountry, calls her Aleela (“she cries”), a pet name she had as a child, which touches her. But her father hasn’t come to greet her, and when Rachel reaches the farm, she sees another woman there, Sara, whom he never mentioned in his letters. It takes no time for Sara to let Rachel know that she shares her father’s bed, runs everything (including him), and plans to marry him. And rather than ease the shock, Sara takes the first chance to ask Rachel privately, “Why did you come?” Aleela will be doing a lot of crying, it seems.

I love McVeigh’s premise and the way she sets it up, with potent economy and subtlety. She knows how to spin a riveting narrative so that the tension never flags, and she devotes this skill to advance her political themes, embodied in Sara, who grew up in Nairobi, hates rural Kenya, which she calls “barren,” and holds herself distant from and superior to anything African. That makes her as different as she could be from Rachel’s mother, and the young woman pays the price, both in what she’s lost and her putative stepmother’s authoritarian regime. Sara forbids her to spend so much time outdoors on the land, urges her to dress in a more “feminine” way, and openly questions whether Rachel’s absence of fear or hatred for Africans means she’s been spoiled or tainted. McVeigh wants you to see that colonialism exists because of people like Sara.

Since I’ve spent time in Africa myself, though never had the good fortune to visit Kenya, I was delighted to read descriptions like this, of Rachel’s impressions of Mombasa:

Bougainvillea tumble over white walls, purple, orange, crimson red, amidst the trumpets of white datura flowers and clusters of pink hibiscus. Dhow captains spread their intricately woven carpets on the street for sale, beating out the dust in thick clouds. Porters in bare feet and white lunghis pad across the hot cobbles between piles of old newspaper and fish bones, past the Arab men dressed in white robes, who sit on low wooden stools drinking tea.

Despite all this brilliance, however, the characters ring false. Sara has no redeeming qualities whatsoever; at one point, Rachel even wonders why her father would have her around and ascribes it to sexual power. But that’s never developed enough to seem real. Moreover, making such a hateful, disagreeable person the mouthpiece for colonialism undermines takes the low road to simplicity and undermines what the author’s trying to say.

Ditto Steven Lockhart, the corrupt, abusive district officer who likes torturing Africans and warns Rachel that he’ll rape her one day. Of both Sara and Steven, I kept thinking, “They’re not really going to say or do that, will they?” only to slap my head when they really do. What’s more, for these characters to be as vicious as they are and get away with it requires Rachel and her father to be as passive as bricks. Not only don’t I believe that–each has taken bold steps in life–I find passivity uninteresting as a literary device.

What that means is that Leopard at the Door must sustain the tension via melodrama. I won’t go into the perils that McVeigh unleashes, which are truly terrifying. Even so, the novel’s Gothic aspects make it less powerful than it should be. That’s a terrible shame. As McVeigh notes in a postscript (and contrary to widely held belief), the facts suggest that the colonial administration wielded far more terror than the Mau Mau did, and in a manner flagrantly belying the rule of law the British pretended to uphold as a “civilizing” mission. I only wish this book had set the record straight in a more nuanced, three-dimensional manner.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Darktown

20 Monday Feb 2017

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Review: Darktown, by Thomas Mullen
Atria, 2016. 371 pp. $26

Atlanta, late 1940s, a dark night. Two police officers on foot patrol see a black woman in a car driven by a white man, who appears to have struck her. The woman manages to escape the car, but soon after, she turns up dead in an abandoned lot.

If this premise reminds you of a conventional mystery, Darktown is anything but. First of all, the two officers are black, part of a grudging concession by the postwar city government to a small but growing presence of African-American voters. And when I say grudging, I mean that the Atlanta Police Department would rather collectively bite the head off a rattler than accept the presence of these men, who number eight in all. If there’s a way to see them dismissed, convicted of spurious crimes, or left for dead in an alley, the unreconstructed Confederates will find it.

Atlanta Negro Voters League, 1949 (Courtesy New Georgia Encyclopedia; not in public domain)

Atlanta Negro Voters League, 1949 (courtesy New Georgia Encyclopedia; not in public domain)

Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, the two officers who witness the woman’s attempt to flee, have already been bound and gagged metaphorically. Like other police, they wear uniforms and badges and carry weapons. But the rules restrict them to black neighborhoods, where they patrol on foot; they have no squad car. They may not investigate crimes, only report them. They may not arrest white suspects—even to try to detain them would be futile–and to have anyone booked, they must call for backup, which may or may not arrive. They may not enter police headquarters, and their “station” is a YMCA basement, where rain leaks down the walls inside.

At the same time, leading voices within the black community demand that they combat the many brutalities white society inflicts, whereas the people the officers arrest accuse them of doing the white man’s job. Why can’t they just look the other way? It’s a no-win situation. Lucius and Tommy not only feel weighed down by competing expectations, they suffer the knowledge that every interaction between black and white may combust at any moment–and if it does, they’ll be blamed.

They were silent as they rode through downtown. They passed restaurants that would not have served them, some of whose waiters or chefs would attack Boggs if he dared walk in. . . . He passed office towers that only granted admittance to Negroes who shined shoes or cleaned bathrooms. He passed white women who would no doubt scream if he made eye contact with them. ‘Reckless eyeballing’ was the official charge police filed in such cases. . . .

Despite all this, however, Lucius and Tommy investigate the young woman’s death and run into heaps of trouble. They do have one ally, though, Dennis Rakestraw, a white rookie cop who may just be more progressive than his peers, and who does some of the inside work that Lucius and Tommy are forbidden to undertake. But their partnership, such as it is, remains uneasy–Mullen conveys that tension very well–and Rakestraw faces significant obstacles of his own. Moreover, every step of the investigation puts more people in jeopardy, several of whom become victims.

For Lucius especially, the son of a prominent preacher, the cost becomes so heavy that he can no longer see where true justice lies, or say for certain that it’s worth the price. And yet he’s aware that he’s a symbol, for his lineage and his uniform, and that if he were to give in, the loss would affect everyone. For his partner, though, the issue is less ambiguous. Tommy’s father, a veteran of the First World War, was lynched for wearing his uniform and marching in a veterans’ parade. To the son, a man who calls himself a man demands justice.

Among the many pleasures and nuances of Darktown is how Mullen compares these two characters’ views, social backgrounds, and dreams. When Tommy attends a party at Lucius’s house, he’s glad he’s dipped into his savings to buy new clothes:

He felt newly conscious of his dropped g’s and propensity for cursing as he spoke with this doctor and that owner of a barbershop empire. He noticed watches and cuff links. More than once a mildly disdainful look faded when he mentioned that he was one of the city’s new police officers, at which point his unpolished qualities suddenly became praiseworthy.

I don’t want to quibble with such an extraordinary novel, but I wish Mullen had found different, less miraculous ways to resolve the story. That’s a drawback, I suppose, of creating drop-dead desperation, but with everything else seeming so real, I had to wonder at how things work out. I also object to a couple of cheap tricks Mullen inserts at the end of two cliff-hanging chapters; he’s too good a writer to need theatrics.

Nevertheless, this is a terrific book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Stifling Assumptions: Among the Living

28 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb
Other Press, 2016. 303 pp. $26

When Yitzhak Goldah, a Czech Holocaust survivor, lands among his American cousins in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947, he at once becomes an object of fascination and dread in the Jewish community. Most people act as if they want to know what happened to him and what he feels about it. But they don’t, really. They’re scared of what he might say, but even more of what that would force them to reckon with–their guilt at having escaped, while their European brethren were murdered.

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, which dates from 1735, as it appeared in 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

So they make sympathetic noises, and when he doesn’t respond the way they hope or think he should, they ascribe his reaction to “all you’ve been through,” without an inkling of what that is. And since he’s reticent by nature, a trait that his experiences at Theresienstadt and Birkenau only reinforced, he lets them assume what they wish, unwilling to reveal more and sensing that they wouldn’t hear it anyway.

He’s right. His cousins and benefactors, Abe and Pearl Jesler, have done their best to make him over. They haven’t even driven him home from the train station before they’ve told him that from now on, he should be Ike, not Yitzhak (Isaac, in English); he’ll work at Abe’s shoe store; attend services at their Orthodox synagogue; and, oh, by the way, there’s a party tonight in your honor, so you’ll want to take a nap first.

Ike feels more comfortable among the black servants and shoe-store employees (who of course are the ones to fetch and haul). It’s not just that he recognizes people who have suffered, or that, like him, they stand outside the gate of what’s accepted and acceptable, though he does so by choice. He grasps implicitly their fate never to be spoken of as an equal, for he endured that too; but again, he’s left that behind, whereas they’re still trapped. But more than that, he finds that Calvin, who tends Abe’s stock room, and Raymond, Calvin’s son, who drives a delivery truck, speak directly, from the heart, and he yearns for that.

He finds it also with Eva, a young war widow with whom he strikes up an immediate rapport. But to Abe, Pearl, and their community, Eva’s the enemy, because she’s Reform, not Orthodox. Maybe you’ve heard the old jokes about the town with two Jews and three synagogues, or about the Jewish castaway who builds two houses of worship on his island, so he can have one that he doesn’t go to. But here, it’s no joke, and Rabb nails that tribal fractiousness dead-center. Ike and Eva ignore the social pressure, but they’re lucky to have an ally. Her father runs a local newspaper, and Ike was a journalist in Prague before the war. You can guess where that will lead.

However, Rabb introduces a further complication, and here’s where things get tense. A woman whom Ike knew from Prague, and whom he thought had died in the camps, comes to Savannah too. And she says he promised to marry her, and that he owes her a good life, at least an attempt at what the Nazis interrupted. They don’t love each other and probably never did. Yet, as she says, if he turns her away, he’ll have to live with that forever. So what does he do? What can he do?

There’s much to like about Among the Living. I admire Rabb’s gift for economy, conveying what remains unsaid during social interactions, and his pitch-perfect rendering of innuendo and gossip. The story offers rich material in which to explore fear, prejudice, and trauma, much of which the author suggests with a subtle hand. For instance, a subplot concerning corruption at Savannah’s docks, for which Raymond pays a gruesome price, provides a contrast to Ike: Rabb sets the hero victim who stands as rebuke to repression against a black man who remains unknown and unsung, and for whom justice doesn’t exist. It’s a nice touch, and it makes you think.

Nevertheless, this lovely novel doesn’t deliver on its promise. Rabb captures the tribal milieu, but he doesn’t persuade me that this is 1947, and that everyone’s recovering from a world war. Rather, so intent is he on separating Ike’s experiences from everyone else’s, it’s as if the war had been an event in which participation was entirely voluntary, and most people in Savannah had simply opted out. Further, though Ike and Eva are engaging characters, I don’t know them as well as I’d like, particularly why he attracts her so easily, though I can see it the other way around. Finally, Rabb does his best to keep you guessing about how things will turn out, but I think he needed to push his characters further away from the happiness they deserve. With a subject like this, it’s hard to balance fairness with a satisfying reality, and yet, I wanted more from Among the Living.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore: The Chaperone

21 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Chaperone, by Laura Moriarty
Riverhead, 2012. 371 pp. $27

The summer of 1922, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks can’t wait to leave Wichita, Kansas, for a month-long New York tryout with an avant-garde dance company. Given the political and social tenor of Wichita, Louise’s parents seem unusually liberal and open-minded, but, to their daughter’s disgust, they give out that they’re looking for a respectable woman to chaperone her. Cora Carlisle, mother of two sons about to enter college, volunteers for the job, and the Brookses accept, while making it seem as if they’re doing her a favor. As for Louise, she promises to be absolutely horrible:

But there was no mistaking the contempt in the girl’s eyes. It was the way a child looked at the broccoli that must be eaten before dessert, the room that must be cleaned before playtime. It was a gaze of dread, made all the more punishing by the girl’s youth and beauty, her pale skin and pouting lips. Cora felt herself blushing. She had not been the subject of this sort of condescension in years.

However, that’s not half of it. No sooner have the two travelers boarded their train than Cora begins to sense what she’s up against. Louise has read all the books Cora has, and then some. She’s even brought Schopenhauer along, which would seem pure affectation, except that she’s marked passages where the philosopher’s observations move her. Unlike Cora, Louise disdains Prohibition, wears no corset (but plenty of makeup), and sees nothing wrong with letting men flirt with her, some of whom are old enough to be her father. Cora assumes that naive, inexperienced Louise is merely acting out, an adolescent unaware of consequences, and that her parents have been negligent in raising her. That they have, but she’s no innocent, nor do appearances fool her, as when she wonders how someone as dull and restrained as Cora could have attracted a man as handsome and successful as her husband. Naturally, the remark cuts the older woman to the quick, especially because, as the reader soon learns, Cora’s marriage isn’t what it seems.

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Louise Brooks, circa 1929 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Cinemaphiles may recognize Louise Brooks as a star of the silent screen; her bobbed hair helped make that style a symbol of the 1920s, and she was the film incarnation of the flapper. So in casting her opposite Cora, Moriarty has drawn the battle lines, for Cora is a fictional representation of a Midwestern Progressive who fought for woman suffrage but has the social and sexual prejudices common to her time and class. At first, therefore, The Chaperone promises to be a funny, sharply observed clash of outlook, to which the splendid sequences in New York, full of feeling and atmosphere, lend zest. Then, to Moriarty’s further credit, the narrative takes off to a higher level altogether.

Cora, it turns out, was an orphan, raised by a Catholic home for abandoned girls, and shipped by train westward, traveling station to station until someone liked the look of her and took her in. Several novelists have written about these trains, and no wonder (see, for example, My Notorious Life); what a heart-breaking story, and Cora’s had me cringing in pain. But the surprise of The Chaperone is that it’s not just Louise who’s looking forward to a taste of freedom in New York. Cora, who has been dutiful all her life, has undertaken to search for her birth mother, and though many obstacles get in her way, she won’t take no for an answer. She could never explain this to Louise, but of the two of them, she winds up having the more satisfying, successful trip.

The Chaperone is a wonderful book, beautifully written, the characters well drawn, even the minor ones. Moriarty thrusts them boldly into situations from which they don’t always emerge proud of themselves, and I like that–except when her earnestness gets the better of her. For instance, when Cora’s horrified to attend a theatrical performance where black and white sit together and the performers are African-American, the author immediately drops in a scene in which a more tolerant Cora talks to black activists in the 1970s. It’s as if Moriarty fears that we won’t like her heroine anymore and has to rescue her.

If there’s one problem with The Chaperone, it’s that discursiveness, the desire to tell all of Cora’s life. I don’t think Moriarty needs to, and the book runs at least fifty pages too long. They’re not bad pages, but they lack the substance of the rest, and the narrative has the feel of looking in vain for a strong ending. I think the story could have stopped years earlier, letting the reader imagine the rest. But still, it’s a terrific book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Too Much, Yet Too Little: The Last Road Home

14 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Last Road Home, by Danny Johnson
Kensington, 2016. 324 pp. $15

As a young North Carolina boy in the late 1950s, Raeford Hurley loses his parents in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandparents, who farm tobacco in Chatham County, not far from Durham. They’re kind to him, and he loves them, but he misses his mother and their brief joyful moments:

We laughed, jumping around and making fools of ourselves, until we had to sit down on the floor. Her happiness would flow out like a circling wind and wrap me up, pulling me into her joy, letting me know it was okay to be alive and be silly. Daddy was the only one I ever saw who could make Momma’s eyes water. I think he would sometimes be mean to her on purpose just to show us life was serious and hard, and not to be wasted being childish. My momma was too gentle to die.

Right away, you understand what Raeford, known as Junebug, is looking for. And where he tries to find it, or, rather, with whom, makes for a gripping premise. Junebug’s only friends are two African-American twins, Lightning and Fancy Stroud, whose sharecropper parents work for white families. By the time they’re fifteen, in the early 1960s, Fancy and Junebug realize their attraction for one another. Despite the threat of exposure and violence in a community where the Ku Klux Klan holds sway, they have a passionate, all-consuming affair.

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, Fancy’s the sexual aggressor, making so many passes at Junebug that there’s no doubt she’s willed them to be together. Hasn’t she been raised to fear such impulses, especially where white boys are concerned? She says she has, yet her romance with Junebug feels inevitable. You know they’ll sleep together; you just don’t know exactly when.

Johnson writes as if Fancy and Junebug were like any two teenagers, who, given time and mutual attraction, will do what comes naturally. There’s naive charm in this, to be sure, but it’s also hard to believe. Surely, they’ve been taught that their relationship is anything but natural, so you’d expect them to struggle against that constraint and get to where they can embrace one another and damn the bigoted world. Instead, the process unfolds externally, based on facts rather than psychological depth–they’ve known each other since they were kids, they find warmth and laughter in each other, and their hormones are overflowing.

Consequently, The Last Road Home feels too self-conscious by half, and the failure to evoke time or place suggests a rootlessness, much as with the orphaned Junebug himself. Johnson excels at interiors; you see the tobacco farm, the chores, the general store in town, and so forth. But you don’t see the town itself, the red dirt by the roadside, or the Confederate flags on the license plates; you don’t smell the tobacco curing when you drive the highway; and the 1960s never emerge, at least not to suggest that the characters live and breathe in their milieu. Even civil-rights protests rate barely a mention, and then only so that a character can predict that the racial landscape will surely change one day.

Rather, Fancy and Junebug exist in a private vacuum. They have no other friends to provide a context or influence their outlook, and Johnson has kept their families small–and, except for Junebug’s grandmother–mostly out of sight. This may seem convenient, because there’s nobody around to upset the grand design, but that’s precisely the difficulty. Rather than explore the interracial love to which other people object, Johnson stuffs the plot with extraneous obstacles, as if blind hatred and the risk of lynching weren’t enough trouble. Without giving anything more away, I’ll paraphrase the jacket flap (too revealing, as is typical). Junebug gets involved in a business deal that goes wrong, leaving him “with a dark secret” he can’t tell anyone. Later, he goes to war, and though the flap doesn’t say where, you know it must be Vietnam.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting just to separate star-crossed lovers. Johnson could have accomplished the same thing had he not restrained the town bigots, who take their time to react and pull their punches when they do. As a result, though The Last Road Home sometimes hits its stride (the Vietnam combat sequences are especially vivid), the novel seems like an explanation rather than a story, a collection rather than a synthesis.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

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Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.

Mistaken Identity: The Good Lord Bird

11 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2013.417 pp. $28

Young Henry Shackleford, who lives in the Kansas Territory in 1856, thinks he’s about twelve. He can’t be sure, because slaves don’t always know when they were born and often adopt January 1 as their birthday. But even in his brief life, Henry has managed to make quite a reputation for himself as a lazy, lying, good-for-nothing who cares only for his next meal and making sure that if and when bullets fly between pro-slavery and abolitionist militia, they pass harmlessly overhead. (They didn’t call it “Bleeding Kansas” for nothing.)

Enter John Brown, the legendary abolitionist who’s committed a few murders himself and whose likeness is plastered on Wanted posters in several states. An argument with Henry’s owner leaves the boy’s father dead, and Brown takes Henry into his band. Over the next four years, ending with the failed rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, the two repeatedly separate and find one another again, their fates bound in many an ironic twist.

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerrotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

John Brown, 1859, copy of a daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

That irony, often humorous, drives the narrative, starting with Henry’s character. He misses slavery, because the eating was regular, and, unlike his time with Brown’s band, he suffered few hardships. (In fact, he thought his master a good sort and reserved his dislike for his father.) Also, since this novel is about identity and disguise, McBride pushes the envelope and has Henry choose to pass as a girl, which will keep him out of the fighting–or so the boy thinks. Strangely, Brown calls him Little Onion and believes that God sent “her” as a sign. Crazy? Sure. But then again, the Old Man, also known as the Captain, sees what he wants to see and does what he likes, confident that he performs the Lord’s work with every breath. This extends to exposing himself to enemy fire carelessly, while his men hide behind any cover they can find:

He stood mute, as usual, apparently thinking something through. His face, always aged, looked even older. It looked absolutely spongy with wrinkles. His beard was no fully white and ragged, and so long it growed down to his chest and could’a doubled for a hawk’s nest. He had gotten a new set of clothes someplace, but they were only worse new versions of the same thing he wore before . . withered, crumpled, and chewed at the edges. . . . In other words, he looked normal, like his clothes was dying of thirst, and he himself was about to keel over out of plain ugliness.

Brave as John Brown is in battle or by hewing strictly to his convictions, don’t ever ask him a direct question, because he’ll unleash a sermon that lasts for hours. Many are hilarious, and such is the fear he instills in his men, even his sons, nobody dares interrupt or hurry him to get to the point. I also laughed when Henry meets Frederick Douglass, whom the boy (still disguised as a girl) has to drink under the table to ward off the leader’s groping hands. Douglass comes off poorly in this book, as all talk about freedom but no action, whereas Harriet Tubman is another matter. She sees right through Henry, sensing his cowardice and belief in nothing except saving himself.

That’s the lesson that Henry learns, slowly, as he moves from frying pan to fire to another, hotter frying pan: that being a man means the willingness to act like one. But that prescription is particularly difficult when he’s trying to pass as a girl, though it’s laughable how easily he fools the men around him (albeit seldom the women, of course). His disguise carries a particular risk when he’s away from Brown’s band, for white men cozy up to him, and he can’t drink them under the table. So The Good Lord Bird isn’t just about racial identity; it’s about power and what it confers on those who wish to use it, sexually or otherwise.

Much as I like McBride’s prose and the picaresque aspect to a brutal subject–both of which remind me of Joe R. Lansdale’s Paradise Sky–they don’t sustain The Good Lord Bird at its considerable length. Henry’s adventures feel repetitive after awhile, with no new point to make, no further envelopes to push. To be sure, McBride’s a marvelous storyteller, never letting his protagonist off the hook, but by the midpoint, the only question is whether Henry will escape before Harper’s Ferry, and you know how that will turn out even if you haven’t read the jacket flap.

All the same, The Good Lord Bird is worth a look. I’ve always wondered whether John Brown was a maniac or a prophet just before his time, and McBride’s portrayal has given me a lot to think about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.