CRY ME A RIVER

Hill’s beclouded third is something of a variation on his A Life for a Life (1998), in which a Louisiana lad, convicted of killing a grocery-store clerk, is put away and, during his six years as a prisoner, is befriended and regularly visited by the dead clerk’s forgiving father.

This time, a father, Tyrone Stokes, a Louisiana drug addict who has gone cold turkey in jail, is released on parole after ten years, only to find when he arrives home in Brownsville that his 17-year-old son Marcus is on death row for murdering a white girl and has but a week to live before execution. Tyrone cannot yield that his son’s character allows for such an act, and he bends himself to saving his son’s life and getting an acquittal within the short time left. But Tyrone is up against a dozen stonewalls that author Hill has built, starting with Marcus’s own puffy-eyed defeatism when Tyrone visits him in the pen. Worse still is the gloom over the home Tyrone has returned to: Daddy dead of worry over Tyrone five years into Tyrone’s jailing; Mother who, in poor health, may die early of worry over both Tyrone and tangled-up Marcus; and Sister René, absolute hell to live with, her sharkteeth in Tyrone’s backside at every turn, blaming him for all the family’s woes, even for Marcus: “Like father, like son.” She wants him to leave. Tyrone’s parole officer as well is a Medusa, freezing Tyrone stone cold. Meanwhile, Marcus’s lawyer, who had the lad plead guilty, is little help until Tyrone finds witnesses who just might help free his gone-be-fried kid.

It be rich bottom-folk dialogue amid the heavy weather. Readers will drag their hearts about like rocks.