Hefty helpings of corn-pone charm become leaden with down-home sanctimony.
Movie viewers who remember the 1991 tearjerker The Man in the Moon know what to expect from screenwriter Wingfield’s first novel, a rural Christian heart-warmer set in 1956 southern Arkansas.
When he loses his latest pulpit, idealistic Methodist preacher Samuel Lake, his lovingly pragmatic wife Willadee and their three spunky kids move in with Willadee’s newly widowed mother Calla Moses on what used to be the family farm. Now Calla runs a grocery store on the front porch. Willadee’s brother Toy, a war hero who lost his leg saving a “Negro” soldier, has taken over the all-night bar Willadee’s father opened on the back porch before he committed suicide. Years ago, Toy killed the man he caught messing with his wife Bernice on the very night he came home from overseas. Everyone in town knows he did it, but the sympathetic local police never brought charges. Ironically, Bernice is still not so secretly in love with her one-time fiancé Samuel and hopes to steal him back from Willadee. Meanwhile, almost-12-year-old Swan Lake—her name’s ha-ha quality is frequently referred to but never explained—quickly gets into various scrapes with her brothers. Soon she becomes the angel/idol of little Blade Ballenger, whose sadistic, perverted father Ras is the evil counterpoint to the two versions of saintly goodness exemplified by Samuel, rigidly devout but never rigid, and Toy, a gentle warrior who protects those he loves at any cost. The early chapters’ high spirits darken when Ras knocks out Blade’s eye with a horse whip while beating him. Soon Blade is living at the Moses house under Toy’s particular protection, Ras is plotting vengeance, and the Lake marriage is in trouble thanks to a subtle nudge from Bernice. Expect not only rape but also kitten murder. Wingfield’s film experience shows in her flair for dialogue. But the simplistic division between good and evil characters and her apparent approval of righteous killing going unpunished may trouble some readers.
Hefty helpings of corn-pone charm become leaden with down-home sanctimony.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-34408-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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