A well-turned if familiar race-themed bildungsroman.
A white boy in a majority-black Boston middle school gets an education on race and friendship.
This debut novel is set in 1992 and narrated by David Greenfeld, aka Green, the son of middle-class parents who send him to a public middle school in the name of progressive politics. “They ‘believe in public schools,’ even when they’re mad ghetto,” he explains early, deploying the hip-hop slang that distinguishes this otherwise fairly conventional coming-of-age story. Bullying? Check: his whiteness makes him a target, and he’s quickly stripped of the expensive, gaudy outfit he buys to earn some street bona fides. Cross-cultural friendship? Check: Green bonds with Marlon “Mar” Wellings, a black classmate from the nearby projects, over Celtics basketball and a mutual interest in passing the entrance exam to Boston Latin high school. Budding self-awareness? Check: Green’s growing awareness of Marlon’s background is matched by his own enlightenment in matters both primal (sex) and intellectual (his Jewish background). Graham-Felsen, who has a similar background to Green’s, writes sensitively about the multiple ways racism manifests in this milieu: Green and Mar’s snow-shoveling hustle only succeeds when Mar isn’t visible to white clients, and Green is oblivious to how Marlon is treated as suspect at a Harvard alumni gathering. Throughout, Celtics star Larry Bird serves as Green’s spirit animal and symbol for the narrative where whiteness represents difference, and Graham-Felsen avoids the biggest danger by making sure Green’s language never feels forced. Green’s delivery is often witty (“What do white girls like to talk about? The Gap? Horses?”). But the author’s focus on Green’s quotidian concerns about school and girls limits attention on Marlon, who has the more dramatic story, and other threads concerning religion, Green’s quirky brother, and his family’s connection to the Holocaust feel extraneous and unfinished.
A well-turned if familiar race-themed bildungsroman.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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