Without the frame or the focus that loosely held Centennial together, this massive but arbitrarily fragmented East-Coast community history—a Maryland island, 1583-1978—is almost devoid of traditional novelistic pleasure. The hundred or so characters are firmly presented as types (e.g., "Bartley Paxmore, at thirty-one, was the new-style Quaker"), most of them members of three representative families: the Catholic, landowning, upper-class progeny of Edmund Steed, who explored the Chesapeake with John Smith in 1608; the dumb but spirited lower-class progeny of Timothy Turlock, who came to Maryland as an indentured servant; and the steady, middle-class, shipbuilding progeny of Quaker Edmund Paxmore, who was dumped in Maryland in 1661 after extensive Massachusetts whippings. Over the years, these clans must deal with pirates, storms, incest, sexism (yes, many of the women here are unlikely feminists), bastards born of philandering, the Revolution (all three broods eventually join in, even the royalist Steeds), and—about half the book—the slavery question. The Turlocks are slimy slave traders, the Steeds are gentle slave owners, the Paxmores are fierce abolitionists, and—in a rather shameless lift from Roots—the Caters are slaves who are seen under the whip and under the covers, in Mandingo-style triangles ("You want to stay longer, honey?"). On to the Civil War (eight pages), the oyster-dredging business, and the 20th Century—which is reduced to three bizarrely selective vignettes: a Paxmore rescuing 40,000 Jews from Hitler, the desegregation struggle, and. . . Watergate, with another Paxmore committing suicide over his White House involvement. As fiction, then—shallow and sketchy throughout, with no theme (except "It's gone. It's all gone") to link or enrich the melodramatic episodes. Nor does all of Michener's digested research produce painless fact feasts: much reads like a junior-high text ("Three reasons accounted for this"); the guest appearances by such as Henry Clay and Geo. Washington ("Your deal, General") seem silly; and the dialectic debates on religion and slavery are dull. But on such matters as shipbuilding, oystering, duck-hunting, Jimmy the blue crab ("that delicious crustacean"), and Onk-or the goose, Michener is a grand popularizer of craft and science. That considerable gift, together with the immense Michener clout, is sure to send millions of readers plunging into what seems like a million blandly readable pages of humdrum history and formula fiction.
Pub Date: July 24, 1978
ISBN: 0812970438
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1978
Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel...
Abandonment, betrayal and loss are the somber themes of this latest exploration of America’s morally compromised history from Morrison (Love, 2003, etc.).
All the characters she sets down in the colonial landscape circa 1690 are bereft, none more evidently so than Florens, 16-year-old slave of Jacob Vaark and his wife Rebekka. Eight years earlier, Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob reluctantly took Florens in settlement of a debt from a Maryland landowner. Her own mother offered her—so as not to be traded with Florens’ infant brother, the girl thinks. (The searing final monologue reveals it was not so simple.) Florens joined a household of misfits somewhere in the North. Jacob was a poor orphan who came to America to make a new start; Rebekka’s parents essentially sold her to him to spare themselves her upkeep. The couple has shared love, but also sadness; all four of their offspring died in childhood. They take in others similarly devastated. Lina, raped by a “Europe,” has been cast out by her Native American tribe. Mixed-race Sorrow survived a shipwreck only to be made pregnant by her rescuer, who handed her over to Jacob. Willard and Scully are indentured servants, farmed out to labor for Jacob by their contract holders, who keep fraudulently extending their time. Only the free African blacksmith who helps Jacob construct his fancy new house—and who catches Florens’ love-starved eye—seems whole and self-sufficient, though he eventually falls prey to Florens’ raging fear of abandonment. Morrison’s point, made in a variety of often-melodramatic plot developments, is that America was founded on the involuntary servitude of blacks and whites, that the colonies are rife with people who belong nowhere else and anxiously strive to find something to hold onto in the New World. Gorgeous language and powerful understanding of the darkest regions in the human heart compensate for the slightly schematic nature of the characters and the plot.
Better seen as a lengthy prose poem than a novel, this allusive, elusive little gem adds its own shadowy luster to the Nobel laureate’s shimmering body of work.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26423-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.
A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet.
Eight years after Obreht’s sensational debut, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), she returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin. She keeps her penchant for animals and the dead but switches up centuries and continents. Having won an Orange Prize for The Tiger’s Wife, a mesmerizing 20th-century Balkan folktale, Obreht cuts her new story from a mythmaking swatch of the Arizona Territory in 1893. The book alternates between the narratives of two complex, beset protagonists: Lurie, an orphan and outcast who killed a boy, and Nora, a prickly frontierswoman with her own guilty conscience. Both speak to the dead. Lurie sees ghosts from early childhood and acquires their “wants,” while Nora keeps up a running conversation with her daughter, Evelyn, dead of heatstroke as a baby but aging into a fine young woman in her mother’s mind. Obreht throws readers into the swift river of her imagination—it takes a while to realize that Lurie is addressing all his remarks to a camel. The land is gripped by terrible drought. As Nora’s homestead desiccates, her husband leaves in search of water, and her older sons bolt after an explosive dispute. An indignant local drunk wonders whether “anybody else in this town [had] read an almanac or history in their lives? What were they all doing here, watching the sky, farming rock and dust?” Still, a deep stoicism, flinty humor, and awe at the natural world pervade these characters. They are both treacherous and good company. Here is Nora, hyperaware of a man who’s not her husband: “Foremost on her mind: the flimsiness of her unlaundered shirt and the weight of her boots.” Lurie, hiding among the U.S. Army’s camel cavaliers (you can look them up), is dogged down the years by Arkansas Marshal John Berger. Their encounters mystify both men. Meanwhile, there are head lice, marvelous, dueling newspaper editorials, and a mute granny with her part to play.
The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9286-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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