A well-paced narrative palpably evokes America’s stormy past.
A turbulent decade reverberates throughout two women’s lives.
The 1960s, as some chroniclers have noted, were nothing less than days of rage for many young men and women suddenly awakened to troubling political realities: overt racism and a violent, divisive war, both provoking an urgent pressure to act morally, to take a stand, “to dig out the rot.” But the upheaval of the '60s was not only political: Especially for women, ethical choices were complicated by love, sex, and, not least, money. White (A Place at the Table, 2013, etc.) handles that complexity with gentleness and empathy in a novel that follows the divergent paths of two friends: Evelyn Elliot Whalen, the cosseted daughter of wealthy, politely racist Atlantans, and Daniella Gold a middle-class, liberal Unitarian whose father is a Jewish professor. In 1962, they happily find themselves roommates at a small Southern women’s college that, the girls discover, holds onto some discomfiting customs: The top sorority refuses to accept Jews, for one; and African American maids, living in the basement of each residence house, clean students’ bedrooms and do their laundry. Eve, eager to take up a cause, protests their working conditions to the college’s headmaster, a gesture that backfires, as the more circumspect and pragmatic Daniella knew it would. Her “silly friend,” she reflects, “thought she could splash and kick her way into an ocean of oppression and instantly change the tide.” Eve continues to kick and splash after they both move to New York, become involved in CORE, and apply to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in registering voters in Mississippi. Daniella worries about the danger: “We should only take actions that are safe?” Eve asks, a question they continue to confront as they struggle to shape their role in the world. Drawing on memoirs, biographies, and histories, White vividly portrays the fractious radicals—such as Eve’s arrogant, manipulative lover—dedicated to smashing “bourgeois notions and attitudes” as well as the trajectory that some of those ardent rebels took in the 1970s and '80s.
A well-paced narrative palpably evokes America’s stormy past.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0891-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.
The heart-expanding extremes of life—first love and last rites—are experienced by an unsettled young Dubliner spending one exceptional spring in a small Irish village.
Christy McMahon “walked this line between the comic and the poignant,” and so does Williams (History of the Rain, 2014, etc.) in his latest novel, another long, affectionate, meandering story, this one devoted to the small rural community of Faha, which is about to change forever with the coming of electricity to the parish. Delighting in the eccentricities of speech, behavior, and attitude of the local characters, Williams spins a tale of life lessons and loves new and old, as observed from the perspective of Noel Crowe, 17 when the book’s events take place, some six decades older as he narrates them. Noel’s home is in Dublin, where he was training to become a Catholic priest, but he's lost his faith and retreated to the home of his grandparents Doady and Ganga in Faha. Easter is coming, and the weather—normally infinite varieties of rain—turns sunny as electrical workers cover the countryside, erecting poles and connecting wires. Christy, a member of the electrical workforce, comes to lodge alongside Noel in Doady and Ganga's garret but has another motive: He’s here to find and seek forgiveness from the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years earlier. While tracing this quest, Williams sets Noel on his own love trajectory as he falls first for one, then all of the daughters of the local doctor. These interactions are framed against a portrait of village life—the church, the Gaelic football, the music, the alcohol—and its personalities. Warm and whimsical, sometimes sorrowful, but always expressed in curlicues of Irish lyricism, this charming book makes varied use of its electrical metaphor, not least to express the flickering pulse of humanity.
A story both little and large and one that pulls out all the Irish stops.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-420-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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