Almost overripe with swampy menace, but compelling and original.
Poisonous reptiles and pitiless Mafiosi menace a man trying to redeem his shell-shocked brother and re-craft a lumberyard in 1920s Louisiana.
Far from the pleasures of the Jazz Age and the comforts of his wealthy Pittsburgh home, straight-shooting Randolph Aldridge faces evil on a scale to match the worst of the world war that drove his older brother Byron round the bend. Louisiana native Gautreaux (Welding With Children, 1999, etc.) knows his bayous and uses them to bring high tension to this story of vicious crime and equally vicious punishment. After fleeing civilization for a life in the West, Byron has turned up as a constable on the family’s lumbering operation at the end of the creaky railroads east of New Orleans. Randolph, too young to have been in the war, follows his domineering father’s orders to take over the messy operation and bring Byron back into the fold, a tall order. The roughnecks felling the ancient trees are a brutal lot who spend their wages at a Mafia owned tavern, routinely razoring each other. Byron has managed to impose a sort of legal presence, but he himself is a boozer, haunted by slaughter of the Great War. Randolph imposes order on the operation, but makes little progress with Byron, and he quickly makes enemies of the tavern owners. The little comfort to be found in this hellhole come from Randolph’s nearly white housekeeper May, whose ticket out of the swamp is to be a white child, if she can just get pregnant by one of the brothers, and then from the arrival of Randolph’s wife Lillian, who shows surprising strength, learning to shoot cottonmouths and acquiring a taste for the local cuisine. As the virgin forest shrinks, the mob comes slithering through the undergrowth and the Aldridges must face them down with a tiny force of mill hands.
Almost overripe with swampy menace, but compelling and original.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41474-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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