Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.
British author Ross debuts with a Faulkner-like saga of love and hate in a racially divided South—ending it in melodrama staged with blood, tears, and tricks.
Agatha Salisbury, high yellow, never knew her parents—nor why from her early childhood the white Jamie Campbell became so constant a visitor at the house in Edene, North Carolina, that she lived in with her widowed grandfather. Not until the bitter end will it be known who Jamie Campbell really is or what he’s really meant to Agatha—and getting to that end is a route long and indirect. At the opening, the intelligent Agatha has already gone to New York, gotten a degree, worked as a math professor—and then, on her aged grandfather’s death, come back to Edene. There, she takes on the raising of a black boy named Tony Pellar—a mute, it seems, until events show otherwise (and later, otherwise again)—and for income works as housekeeper for the crabby Miss Ezekial, white and also raising a boy, her grandson Mikey Tennyson. These events take place in the ’60s, when “night riders” torment (and sometimes kill) civil rights workers—and when they threaten even Agatha, who secretly helps targeted blacks escape to the north. Much of the story, in flashback, is told by Tony, now in his 30s and eking out a paranoia- and guilt-ridden life in the subway tunnels of New York City. Why his near-psychotic fears, his imagining that Agatha is coming to kill him? Where is Agatha? What did happen to her 30-some years back? In urgent, unpunctuated passages, Tony recalls his old friendship with Mikey, begins to exchange letters with him (Mikey is now a professor himself), and gradually disinters not only the horror of what finally destroyed the courageous Agatha, but, less substantially compelling, a whole batch of romance-style guess-who-was-really-who’s.
Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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