Despite some narrative flaws: deeply enjoyable for its heart, spirit, and furiously wagging tongues.
An extraordinary friendship in small-town North Carolina dominates Ferrell’s compelling third novel.
Gossip is the lifeblood of Branch Creek, the setting also for Ferrell’s debut (Where She Was, 1985). Now, news that local florist Jerry Chiffon, wearing drag, has tried to gun down one of the state’s US senators sends the town into a frenzy. Jerry and his benefactor, Mrs. Maggie Labrette, have been the town’s tastemakers, Jerry as the son of a dirt-poor tenant farmer and Maggie as one who’s rich and pampered—though it’s her impeccable taste and nonjudgmental Christian charity that have set her apart. She and Jerry met back when Jerry’s mother died during a childbirth gone hideously wrong, effectively turning seven-year-old Jerry into the damaged baby’s new mother. Jerry, who “switched tribes” in taking up a woman’s chores, soon visits Maggie every Saturday, impressing her with his loving care of the deformed baby and his hunger to learn how rich folks live. Later, these Saturdays will culminate in a legendary dinner-party—followed the next day by the baby’s being found dead and Jerry’s father, in the act of striking his son, suffering a fatal stroke (the same father who once dragged Jerry to a rally for the racist, homophobic senator). As Ferrell shuffles two faces of the South, the home of mean-spirited hate and the beacon of gracious living, Jerry comes to see the removal of the senator as an aesthetic imperative, like uprooting a weed. Before the shooting, though, he spends seven years in New York, acquires a gay sensibility, finds and loses a lover to murderous homophobes, and witnesses the onset of the plague. And after the shooting, Maggie visits him in prison until her own health gives out. All along, a stunning secret lies coiled at the heart of the story, one that the reader learns late and Branch Creek never, deprived of the juiciest gossip in its history.
Despite some narrative flaws: deeply enjoyable for its heart, spirit, and furiously wagging tongues.Pub Date: April 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-189-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0375415351
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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