Fans of Mosley’s nonfiction (Workin’ on the Chain Gang, 1997, etc.) will know from the beginning what Bennet wants from...
In Mosley’s boldly understated fable, an unemployed African-American agrees to rent space in his basement to a wealthy white businessman for two months.
Except for living in New York’s Harbor district, Charles Blakey might be a double for the denizens of Mosley’s Watts (Six Easy Pieces, 2003, etc.). He’s got no wife, no current girlfriend, few friends—though those few are ancient and loyal—and no work since he was fired from his job as a bankteller for petty embezzling. Worse still, he’s about to lose the house his family’s lived in for seven generations because he can’t make payments on the mortgage he’s taken out to tide him over. But when Greenwich reclamation expert Anniston Bennet approaches him with a request to let his basement for the summer, Charles isn’t even tempted—until his other feeble sources of income dry up and his back is to the wall. It turns out that Bennet is offering a fabulous sum, nearly $50,000, for his stay; that he’s picked Charles out especially as his host after doing a great deal of research; and that in cleaning out the basement to make it ready for him, Charles, who according to antique dealer Narciss Gully has turned up family heirlooms worth just as much as Bennet promises, doesn’t really need his money anymore. By this time, however, he’s become entranced by the combination of mastery and submission the white man is offering him, and the two enter into a relationship that becomes steadily more lacerating for them both.
Fans of Mosley’s nonfiction (Workin’ on the Chain Gang, 1997, etc.) will know from the beginning what Bennet wants from Charles. Even given the resulting lack of suspense and a story that falls off sharply by the end, this slender parable is Mosley’s most provocative and impassioned novel yet.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-57082-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Canin's return to short fiction should be a cause for welcome- -yet isn't, disappointingly. In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues—as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)—to strive for ``wise'' adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable—turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme—that we repeat as adults what we do as children- -each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In ``Accountant,'' an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In ``City of Broken Hearts,'' a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in ``Batorsag and Szerelem,'' a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate ``kid-brother'' writer)—and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide. The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes—an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41962-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.
Brooks combines her penchant for historical fiction (Year of Wonders, 2001, etc.) with the literary-reinvention genre as she imagines the Civil War from the viewpoint of Little Women’s Mr. March (a stand-in for Bronson Alcott).
In 1861, John March, a Union chaplain, writes to his family from Virginia, where he finds himself at an estate he remembers from his much earlier life. He’d come there as a young peddler and become a guest of the master, Mr. Clement, whom he initially admired for his culture and love of books. Then Clement discovered that March, with help from the light-skinned, lovely, and surprisingly educated house slave Grace, was teaching a slave child to read. The seeds of abolitionism were planted as March watched his would-be mentor beat Grace with cold mercilessness. When March’s unit makes camp in the now ruined estate, he finds Grace still there, nursing Clement, who is revealed to be, gasp, her father. Although drawn to Grace, March is true to his wife Marmee, and the story flashes back to their life together in Concord. Friends of Emerson and Thoreau, the pair became active in the Underground Railroad and raised their four daughters in wealth until March lost all his money in a scheme of John Brown’s. Now in the war-torn South, March finds himself embroiled in another scheme doomed to financial failure when his superiors order him to minister to the “contraband”: freed slaves working as employees for a northerner who has leased a liberated cotton plantation. The morally gray complications of this endeavor are the novel’s greatest strength. After many setbacks, the crop comes in, but the new plantation-owner is killed by marauders and his “employees” taken back into slavery. March, deathly ill, ends up in a Washington, DC, hospital, where Marmee visits and meets Grace, now a nurse. Readers of Little Women know the ending.
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.Pub Date: March 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03335-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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