A wrenching and sharply observed novel of unconventional love and family tragedy in 20th-century New England.
A novel about love and yearning in small-town Vermont.
“Blood is blood,” one character darkly intones in Nolan’s taut, evocative novel, and this phrase haunts the events of the story that unfolds in Branlee Village, in Vermont’s Caledonia County in the mid-20th century. Branlee is a tiny place, centered on a town meeting hall, a post office, and the Branlee Country Store (“It smelled like creosote and strong coffee from the outside and, every morning, it smelled like bacon and eggs and strong coffee from the inside”) and surrounded by small-hold farms. The store is owned and run by Bunny Farrow, who narrates the tale from a point many years in the future. Bunny married Stephen Hart when she was young, but after he was killed in World War II, she chose not to remarry and instead established a romantic relationship with a woman named Nicole in Montreal. During Bunny’s many visits to the city, she and Nicole are slightly freer to show affection in public that they would be in Bunny’s hometown. As the story goes on, readers also meet two young cousins from Branlee: shy, bookish Rebecca and pretty Diane, who relishes the attention of men at the Leroux Roller Rink and its attached dance hall. After Rebecca is seduced by loutish James Letourneau (who radiates a “greasy, self-satisfied malevolence”) and dies after giving birth to a son, Henri, in 1956, Bunny defiantly insists that she raise the baby herself. That’s when James notes that blood is blood and that someday he’ll collect his offspring. After that day comes, Bunny spends the rest of the novel worrying about Henri from a distance.
“Do you know the suspended, tingling fear you feel after a flash of lightening [sic] rends the heavens in a summer’s storm?” Bunny asks at one point. “You know a roll of thunder will follow in one explosive, earth-shattering instant.” This same sense of foreboding hangs over Nolan’s setting—a small town that’s “the kind of place a girl moves away from, not the other way around.” Throughout, Nolan effectively evokes a gritty, genuine Vermont (not the picture-postcard version that “the tourism folks like to sell”), and his novel’s portrait of how Bunny’s six years of mothering little Henri fills her with joy is so touching that readers will likely wish it were longer. James is a one-dimensional, monstrous villain, but Bunny is well-developed and complicated, as is the depiction of her life as a lesbian in 1950s Vermont and Canada. As a character, she anchors the book well, and the author wisely has the reader share her agony at not knowing what’s happening to Henri on the Letourneau farm; there’s a persistent dread that James’ noxious rages will attach to Henri like a curse. The book’s multilayered final acts give readers more views of Henri as a young man, but Nolan respects his readers enough to avoid any pat conclusions.
A wrenching and sharply observed novel of unconventional love and family tragedy in 20th-century New England.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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