An impressively executed novel of love and the law in antebellum America.
A debut historical novel tells the story of a mixed-race family trying to secure an inheritance from its white patriarch before the Civil War.
As the Willis family disembarks from the Cincinnati quay in 1855, it attracts some strange looks from passersby. The members are racially mixed—Elijah Willis is white, his wife (and former slave), Amy, is black, and their seven children run the spectrum from fair to dark. The stares become worse when Elijah suddenly grabs his chest, falls to the ground, and dies. In Elijah’s pocket is his will, which bequeaths his entire estate to Amy and their children. Unfortunately for Amy, most of that estate is in the form of land—land in South Carolina held by Elijah’s avaricious white relatives (“This was a sizable fortune for the time, amounting to more than three thousand acres of land valued at upwards of $150,000, not including cash and furnishings”). Now Amy, with the help of a sympathetic team of Cincinnati lawyers, will have to wage a legal battle against the entrenched forces of racism and slavery to secure what should be hers by right: her husband’s material legacy, and recognition that her family is as legitimate as any other. Based on a true story, this novel covers the full history of Elijah and Amy’s relationship, as well as the case that took the Willis family all the way to the South Carolina Supreme Court. Stucky writes with a historian’s eye for detail, taking care to recreate the voice (and minutiae) of the times. “Since last I wrote,” goes a letter from Elijah, “we have endured a political uprising designed to malign and intimidate me; the birth of a son; the ravages of yellow fever on my plantation; a bout of excessive rain nearly ruining the cotton harvest.” At 750 pages, the book is a doorstop. Every epic has its down moments, and there are a few passages here that feel a bit dry. That said, the comprehensive nature of Stucky’s inquiry into this little-known incident in American history, breathing life and color into its biographical details, is such an immersive experience that the reader should stay with the story all the way to the epilogue.
An impressively executed novel of love and the law in antebellum America.Pub Date: May 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-21860-0
Page Count: 762
Publisher: Eastcliff Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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