Unapologetically over the top.
A society architect joins a gang of New York, circa 1886.
In the second of architect-turned-novelist Belfoure’s historical homages to his profession (The Paris Architect, 2013), the protagonist, John Cross, is a talented designer whose rank in the city’s rarified old-money society seems assured. His wife, Helen, is related to Caroline Astor, Manhattan’s most revered hostess. Mrs. Astor’s largesse has allowed Cross’ eldest son, George, to attend Harvard, and Aunt Caroline is shepherding and financing Cross’ daughter, Julia, 17, through the byzantine ritual of making her debut. However, one whiff of scandal associated with Cross or his family would be enough to blackball him from Mrs. Astor’s good graces. When George’s intractable gambling habit leaves him owing $48,000 to the suave but depraved gangster James T. Kent, kingpin of Kent’s Gents, Cross indentures himself to the gang to pay off his son’s debt. Cross provides the Gents with blueprints of buildings he designed and instructions on how to locate and spirit away the riches they house. Meanwhile, Julia escapes her remarkably gullible chaperones to follow John Nolan, a dapper pickpocket she spots outside Lord & Taylor. Soon Nolan is introducing her to cockfights and a spectator sport known as “ratting.” Charlie, Cross’ 10-year-old second son, who, unlike Julia, lacks even the semblance of adult supervision, falls in with Eddie, a newsie, and dabbles, for a few hours each day, in the lifestyle of a street urchin. As Cross directs more and more daring heists for Kent’s Gents—Helen actually helps him target which nouveau riche family mansion to pilfer—he finds himself enjoying the thrill. However, when his older brother, Robert, a Pinkerton guard, starts investigating the crime spree, Cross’ plan to avoid scandal, not to mention bodily harm, seems doomed. Despite some improbable situations, an entertaining excursion through Gilded Age New York with all the right architectural details.
Unapologetically over the top.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4926-1789-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and...
What if the metaphorical Underground Railroad had been an actual…underground railroad, complete with steam locomotive pulling a “dilapidated box car” along a subterranean nexus of steel tracks?
For roughly its first 60 pages, this novel behaves like a prelude to a slave narrative which is, at once, more jolting and sepulchral than the classic firsthand accounts of William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup. Its protagonist, Cora, is among several African-American men and women enslaved on a Georgia plantation and facing a spectrum of savage indignities to their bodies and souls. A way out materializes in the form of an educated slave named Caesar, who tells her about an underground railroad that can deliver her and others northward to freedom. So far, so familiar. But Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels (Zone One, 2011, etc.) playing fast and loose with “real life,” both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet by giving the underground railroad physical form. This train conveys Cora, Caesar, and other escapees first to a South Carolina also historically unrecognizable with its skyscrapers and its seemingly, if microscopically, more liberal attitude toward black people. Compared with Georgia, though, the place seems so much easier that Cora and Caesar are tempted to remain, until more sinister plans for the ex-slaves’ destiny reveal themselves. So it’s back on the train and on to several more stops: in North Carolina, where they’ve not only abolished slavery, but are intent on abolishing black people, too; through a barren, more forbidding Tennessee; on to a (seemingly) more hospitable Indiana, and restlessly onward. With each stop, a slave catcher named Ridgeway, dispensing long-winded rationales for his wicked calling, doggedly pursues Cora and her diminishing company of refugees. And with every change of venue, Cora discovers anew that “freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, the empty meadow, you see its true limits.” Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller’s deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass’ grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft’s rococo fantasies…and that’s when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is.
Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53703-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.
Irish orphan finds a new family among slaves in Grissom’s pulse-quickening debut.
Lavinia is only six in 1791, when her parents die aboard ship and the captain, James Pyke, brings her to work as an indentured servant at Tall Oaks, his Virginia plantation. Pyke’s illegitimate daughter Belle, chief cook (and alternate narrator with Lavinia), takes reluctant charge of the little white girl. Belle and the other house slaves, including Mama Mae and Papa George, their son Ben, grizzled Uncle Jacob and youngsters Beattie and Fanny, soon embrace Lavinia as their own. Otherwise, life at Tall Oaks is grim. Pyke’s wife Martha sinks deeper into laudanum addiction during the captain’s long absences. Brutal, drunken overseer Rankin starves and beats the field slaves. The Pykes’ 11-year-old son Marshall “accidentally” causes his young sister Sally’s death, and Ben is horribly mutilated by Rankin. When Martha, distraught over Sally, ignores her infant son Campbell, Lavinia bonds with the baby, as well as with Sukey, daughter of Campbell’s black wet nurse Dory. Captain Pyke’s trip to Philadelphia to find a husband for Belle proves disastrous; Dory and Campbell die of yellow fever, and Pyke contracts a chronic infection that will eventually kill him. Marshall is sent to boarding school, but returns from time to time to wreak havoc, which includes raping Belle, whom he doesn’t know is his half-sister. After the captain dies, through a convoluted convergence of events, Lavinia marries Marshall and at 17 becomes the mistress of Tall Oaks. At first her savior, Marshall is soon Lavinia’s jailer. Kindly neighboring farmer Will rescues several Tall Oaks slaves, among them Ben and Belle, who, unbeknownst to all, was emancipated by the captain years ago. As Rankin and Marshall outdo each other in infamy, the stage is set for a breathless but excruciatingly attenuated denouement.
Melodramatic for sure, but the author manages to avoid stereotypes while maintaining a brisk pace.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5366-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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