A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.
A dark “biomythography”—to use a word coined by Audre Lorde, as Foote does—about the Great Migration.
Around 1916, the families of Lucy Grimes and Celia Coleman decide they’ve had enough of the South. Sick of living on and farming land that belongs to white people, they opt to move north, lured by letters from friends and neighbors who have relocated: “Us women could stay at home all day, baking blackberry pie for our husbands and children. We could have hands like the lily-white ladies in the Sears Roebuck catalog—real soft and smooth, cuz we’d cream em every night. The only cotton we’d touch would be our dresses and gloves and the babies’ diapers.” Lucy and Celia meet on a train to New Jersey, where they hope for better things. The two are unlikely friends: Lucy is gentle and retiring; Celia is “coarse” and “abrasive.” Both become widowed and are forced to raise their children alone; Celia turns to the bottle for comfort. Their relationship is destroyed after Celia catches her son, Jebbie, playing doctor with Lucy’s daughter Bertha. Jebbie and Bertha grow up to have children together, but Bertha loses a pregnancy after Celia shoves her down the stairs. The rest of Foote’s debut novel—inspired by her own family—traces the intergenerational trauma of the entwined families over the ensuing decades. There’s a great deal of focus on Celia, who is revealed to be so mean and drunk that some of her own grandchildren plot to murder her. Though this is a brutal novel, devoid of anything approaching light, Foote’s prose is excellent and her dialogue rings true. She paints a vivid picture of the community of Vauxhall, New Jersey, and sticks the landing at the end of the book. The structure is a bit scattered, and one wishes the stories that make up the novel cohered a little more, but that’s mostly nitpicking—this is a promising debut from a clearly gifted writer.
A brutally effective look at intergenerational trauma.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781638931140
Page Count: 320
Publisher: SJP Lit/Zando
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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