Facebook X-twitter Instagram Linkedin

Arlene McKanic

Fiction

The tight grip of a mother’s love

Review by Arlene McKanic

Windsor Armstrong, the protagonist of Alice Randall's stellar sophomore novel Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has a problem. Her son, star football player Pushkin X, is marrying a Russian lap dancer, and it's driving her crazy. The craziness springs from the fact that Windsor, a professor of Afro-Russian studies with a near fetish for the great poet after whom her son is named, is a control freak who regards her future daughter-in-law with a blunt racism.

The reader is initially not inclined to like Windsor very much. But Randall, the gifted author of the controversial novel The Wind Done Gone, eventually makes us care for the uptight, cerebral and self-obsessed professor. Certainly Windsor has a reason to be uptight; she was the child of a cold and narcissistic mother and a father whose love was so overwhelming that when he finally split with his wife he made Windsor feel guilty for not staying with him no matter that she was all of 10 years old and had no say in custody matters.

Windsor's tumultuous extended family is made up of folks of mixed race and mixed motives. Pushkin X is the product of a rape that occurred just before Windsor arrived at Harvard. Undaunted, she not only decided to keep the baby, but also went on to get her degree, though it meant having to leave her son behind in Detroit with a disreputable caretaker. Her gnawing guilt also colors her attitude toward Pushkin X, but Windsor's love for her son is as all-encompassing as her father's was for her. Randall infuses the book with the aching sadness of a mother who, having struggled and achieved a certain level of success, must find a way to allow her son to live his own life. In Windsor Armstrong, Randall has created an unusual, exasperating but ultimately sympathetic heroine. As Windsor says of herself, "There are stories within me and vanishings about me. Who will I show you? Who do you really need to see?" Pushkin and the Queen of Spades is a thought-provoking work from a writer with a unique view of the world.

Windsor Armstrong, the protagonist of Alice Randall's stellar sophomore novel Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has a problem. Her son, star football player Pushkin X, is marrying a Russian lap dancer, and it's driving her crazy. The craziness springs from the fact that Windsor, a professor of Afro-Russian studies with a near fetish for […]
HistoryBlack History

A month full of milestones in Black History

Review by Arlene McKanic

This year marks the 77th anniversary of America's Black History celebration, a memorial that began in 1926 as Black History Week and has since expanded into a month-long tribute to African-American culture and heritage. The idea for this time of remembrance originated with Carter G. Woodson, a black scholar and Harvard graduate who chose February as a time for commemoration because two important figures in African-American history, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, celebrated birthdays during that month. The creation of the NAACP and the death of Malcolm X also occurred in February, making the time an especially appropriate one. Woodson would be pleased with the variety of titles published this year in honor of the celebration he initiated.

This Far By Faith: Stories From the African American Religious Experience, the companion volume to the PBS television series airing in June, explores the role of religion in black culture. Written by Emmy Award-winner Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize, and Quinton Dixie, the book blends research, interviews and input from noted contemporary religious figures with unforgettable photographs and archival material. The book contains fascinating tales of people on fire with faith, like Sojourner Truth, whose absolute trust in God allowed her to walk away from an unjust owner and campaign for the rights of women and African Americans. We read of the establishment of the storefront church as blacks migrated north, the indispensability of the largely Protestant church in the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the controversial Nation of Islam. This Far By Faith is a wonderfully comprehensive evaluation of the ways in which African Americans have worshiped, as well as a moving tribute to the life of the spirit.

The path to freedom

As Ann Hagedorn's novelistic Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad demonstrates, Harriet Tubman wasn't the only guide on the clandestine path to freedom. The book begins long before Tubman takes up her courageous, dangerous cause and focuses on the brave white abolitionists around the town of Ripley, Ohio, one of the railroad's first and most notorious stations. Hagedorn recounts in thrilling detail the risks these men and women took by helping desperate slaves escape to freedom. Reverend Elijah Lovejoy was the first white abolitionist to be murdered for the cause in 1837, but the book's real protagonist is John Rankin, who dedicated much of his life to the freeing of fugitive slaves and lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation. Tubman herself became active in the 1850s, joining courageous figures like John Parker as one of the few black conductors who actually went South to guide people out. Beyond the River is full of compelling stories of narrow escapes, near-misses, stunning acts of bravery and eventual vindication.

At the crossroads

The focus of Stephan Talty's provocative book Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History is the tumultuous intermingling between blacks and whites in this country a social phenomenon that gave rise to pioneers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, who stepped into arenas previously restricted to whites and brought them to new levels of brilliance. Covering miscegenation, both literally and figuratively, from the years before the Civil War to contemporary times, the book is an insightful study of American cross-culturalization.

While the volume examines the impact of light-skinned entertainers such as Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, as well as sexy, silky-voiced crooners Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke and other black notables who used the blending of black and white to their own advantage, Mulatto America also documents the adaptation of black culture by whites a social appropriation that has given rise to modern icons like Eminem. Talty, a journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine and the Chicago Review, delivers an intelligent and accessible analysis of race in this country with Mulatto America.

Glimpses of history

Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle, with text by scholars Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, presents a vivid overview of the African-American experience from 1840 to the present. The visuals, edited by noted photographer Sophie Spencer-Wood, depict just about every aspect of black American life, with photos that range from early shots of slaves to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Divided into five sections, each with an introduction, the book includes class photos, pictures of lynchings, shots of literary lights like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and images of ordinary people working at ordinary jobs. We see the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, including Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after her arrest, and Martin Luther King Jr. posing with calm dignity for his mug shot. Tellingly enough, one of the last photos in this beautiful volume is of a bored-looking Condi Rice at a policy meeting with Colin Powell and President Bush. Freedom is a groundbreaking book.

Remembering the ladies

In Praise of Black Women by Simone Schwarz-Bart is the second entry in a four-volume series that pays homage to remarkable African-American females in history. Focusing on the slavery era, this generously illustrated book features folk tales, history and personal writings, and spans four centuries, beginning with the 1400s. From the Congo to the French West Indies, from Canada to Boston, In Praise of Black Women shares the stories of unforgettable figures like poet Phillis Wheatley; Anastasia, the patron saint of Brazil's black population; and escaped slave Ellen Craft. Full of rare photos and historical documents, this book is a wonderful tribute to the female spirit.

Arlene McKanic is a writer in Jamaica, New York.

This year marks the 77th anniversary of America's Black History celebration, a memorial that began in 1926 as Black History Week and has since expanded into a month-long tribute to African-American culture and heritage. The idea for this time of remembrance originated with Carter G. Woodson, a black scholar and Harvard graduate who chose February […]
Children's & YA

A diva gets her due

Review by Arlene McKanic

Marian Anderson was arguably the greatest contralto of the last century. Can anyone who's seen that grainy newsreel of her performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forget her glorious bell-like voice as she defiantly sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee?" Also unforgettable was the would-be humiliation of her being barred from Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. an insult Anderson transformed into an act of triumph that flattened and routed her enemies forever. (The Daughters of the American Revolution, who ran the hall and denied Anderson admission, never quite got over their comeuppance, especially when Eleanor Roosevelt gave up her membership in protest over their bigotry.)

Pam Muñoz Ryan's beautiful children's book, When Marian Sang, with its exquisite illustrations by Caldecott medalist Brian Selznick, gently tells the Lincoln Memorial story as well as other incidents from Marian's life, beginning with her Philadelphia childhood. The illustrations in the book are breathtaking. The great singer is caught in a cone of light that interrupts a sky full of stars. She sings with her eyes shut, wearing a black gown with a black velvet rose at her shoulder. A few pages into the story, we find the interior of a nearly empty opera house done in lavish detail. All of Selznick's illustrations are in shades of brown, cream and gold, almost like sepia-toned photographs. One picture is an amazing portrait of Marian as a child, standing on a chair among a choir of grownups and singing, as usual, with her eyes blissfully shut. What the reader notices is that the robes of the choir are parted to reveal a bit of the same starry sky that's on the cover, as if the singers are being transformed into pure spirit. You can almost hear the low, serene note that they're singing.

This wonderful tribute to the diva's groundbreaking career ends with her triumphant debut, at age 56, as Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera at the Metropolitan Opera. Anderson, of course, went on to greatness, and her heirs include such singers as Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman and Audra MacDonald. When Marian Sang is an inspiring, gorgeous look at her remarkable life.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Marian Anderson was arguably the greatest contralto of the last century. Can anyone who's seen that grainy newsreel of her performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial forget her glorious bell-like voice as she defiantly sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee?" Also unforgettable was the would-be humiliation of her being barred from Constitution Hall […]
Fiction

Fixing a broken world

Review by Arlene McKanic

Modern life is rubbish and lonely, declares one of the subtitles of Zadie Smith's tumultuous new novel, The Autograph Man, and in present day England, life seems especially trashy. The sun doesn't shine, and when it does it's a scourge. The royal family is pixilated. The cows are mad. The Prime Minister goes out of his way to be America's poodle. Her Majesty's subjects, of various classes and ethnicities, chafe against each other in spiritual and physical squalor.

Into this hubbub Smith drops Alex-Li Tandem, a Jewish, half-Chinese autograph man in his 20s whose passion for collecting and trading signatures began the day his father died as he and Alex's friends were on the verge of securing the autograph of a pro wrestler. Alex's friends include his best mate Adam, who's black and a devout Jew and whose sister Alex uncomfortably courts when they grow up; Rubinfine, who becomes a rabbi; and Joseph, who turned Alex on to autograph hounding that fateful day in Albert Hall.

Alex's desideratum is the signature of Kitty Alexander, an actress whose Eurasian looks she's really Russian and Italian, as much of a mutt as Alex won her the roles of Anna May Wong types in cheesy '50s movies. Her autograph is rarer than Garbo's, but, nearly miraculously, Alex comes into possession of one. This gift prompts him to leave his crummy apartment in a London suburb ironically named Mountjoy and fly to Brooklyn, where Kitty lives. There he hooks up with a bunch of suspicious characters, including an African-American woman with a germ phobia named Honey, and tries at last to meet the great lady of the B movies, who till then had spent 15 years ignoring his fluffy fan letters.

Smith is a 26-year-old Englishwoman of mixed ethnicity herself (her father is English, her mother Jamaican), whose debut novel, White Teeth, won critical raves and a spot on the bestseller list. She's an intelligent writer who seems to know a lot about many things. Her use of language is exceptional and subtle, from her description of the way Alex's cat bumps him with her tail to the quality of Kitty's forehead as it flows into her nose.

In an interesting twist, the titles of the first part of the book are linked to the branches of the Kabbalistic tree of life, a prominent symbol of the Jewish mystical sect that believes the world is broken. The novel is Alex's quest to unbreak the world, which hasn't been right since the death of his beloved father. Of course, he blunders repeatedly. He drops a substance that lets him visit the cosmos without a spaceship, then involves his pacemaker-wearing girlfriend in a car wreck. Near the end he commits an act which, on the surface, is dishonorable. But Smith keeps us pulling for her befuddled hero.

Alex and his friends truly care for each other, and he turns to them for emotional anchoring. The end of the book has Alex, at Adam's urging, finally saying a long-postponed Kaddish for his dead father. The ritual, despite the yawns and fidgets of the mourners, fixes at least a tiny corner of the world. Sad, funny and ambitious, The Autograph Man is a noteworthy sophomore work.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

 

Modern life is rubbish and lonely, declares one of the subtitles of Zadie Smith's tumultuous new novel, The Autograph Man, and in present day England, life seems especially trashy. The sun doesn't shine, and when it does it's a scourge. The royal family is pixilated. The cows are mad. The Prime Minister goes out of his way to be America's poodle. Her Majesty's subjects, of various classes and ethnicities, chafe against each other in spiritual and physical squalor.

Fiction

Leaving Atlanta

Review by Arlene McKanic

Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, takes place in 1979, around the time of the infamous murders of African-American children in Atlanta, but this powerful new novel isn't what you might think. To her credit, Jones doesn't present us with the point of view of the murderer; the bloodiest thing that happens is a busted lip from a playground fall. Instead, ingeniously, Jones sees the events through the eyes of three schoolchildren, whose utterly ordinary lives are skewed by the fact that a shadowy killer is out there.

The children, who attend the same elementary school, are Tasha, whose parents' divorce is interrupted by the killing spree; Rodney, the class nerd whose bad relationship with his boorish father leads to tragedy; and Octavia, an intelligent child shunned for being both too poor and too black for her schoolmates. Yes, Jones does go unflinchingly into the color thing among African Americans. What's more remarkable is that she presents the voices of these children with rare precision.

In the midst of the horror, the three kids, all on the cusp of puberty, must still deal with their school's Darwinian social structure, including precarious contact with the opposite sex, adults who mean well and adults who don't and parents whose love for them is, to paraphrase Tillie Olsen, more anxious than proud. Jones grasps both the pain of having to sit by yourself in the cafeteria and the humiliation of poverty, the pleasure of a brand-new pink coat lined with bunny fur and the dismaying cliquishness of young girls. The children are so vivid and alive that one's stomach knots up with increasing apprehension from nearly the first page. "Please don't let any of these children be snatched," you pray, but, like Octavia, you find that not all prayers are answered.

The book's ending is one of the most quietly devastating this reviewer has ever read. Leaving Atlanta, which deals with the effects of serial murder, is simply brilliant a gentle and beautiful book on a horrific subject.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

 

Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, takes place in 1979, around the time of the infamous murders of African-American children in Atlanta, but this powerful new novel isn't what you might think. To her credit, Jones doesn't present us with the point of view of the murderer; the bloodiest thing that happens is a busted […]
Children's & YA

The siren’s song of the street

Review by Arlene McKanic

Taking its cue from the brutal reality of the urban streets, Barbara Joosse's new picture book, Stars in the Darkness, is based on a young man the author knew who was drawn into a street gang.

This inspiring story is narrated by a little boy whose older brother joins a dangerous bunch of thugs. Using his imagination, the youngster transforms the dangers of his neighborhood: sometimes he and his mother look out the window and imagine that they live on the moon. The streetlights are stars, the sirens are "wild wolves howlin' at the moon," while the sound of guns going off in the distance is the "light of stars crackin' the darkness." The narrator shares a bed with his adored older brother Richard, who takes the position nearest the window to protect him. Yet, as the child often says, "I know what I know." And he knows when Richard succumbs to the siren song of the street's danger the malevolent prestige, the easy money, the sense of belonging. So this smart boy and his loving and frightened mother work out a plan to involve the neighborhood in confronting, peaceably, the gangbangers who are on the verge of completely claiming Richard.

Although this is a children's book, Joosse doesn't soft-pedal the material; she makes this sad tale believable. The characters are familiar: the narrator, his mother and his brother speak in the vigorous idiom of the inner city, and the reader can almost hear the narrator's voice, still childish, stubbornly hopeful, made to sound tougher than he really feels.

R. Gregory Christie's illustrations have the simplicity, density and raw energy of schoolkids' poster board paintings. His faces are realistic and nuanced; you almost expect them to come to jittery life the wasted face of a gangbanger with a red bandana around his head, a dog pawing through a Dumpster, a mother's strong but careworn face and severely relaxed hair. Best of all is the face of the narrator set atop a thin, two-dimensional body that seems to be, but isn't, an afterthought. The young face is portrayed throughout the book as curious, suspicious, anxious, tentatively happy, even half-asleep. Children will identify with this range of emotions.

Stars in the Darkness is a poignant and hopeful book.

Taking its cue from the brutal reality of the urban streets, Barbara Joosse's new picture book, Stars in the Darkness, is based on a young man the author knew who was drawn into a street gang. This inspiring story is narrated by a little boy whose older brother joins a dangerous bunch of thugs. Using […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Finding love in the heart of darkness

Review by Arlene McKanic

A ghastly scene in Sarah Stone's fascinating first novel, The True Sources of the Nile, starkly illustrates the saying that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic. At the beginning of a shocking massacre in the African nation of Burundi, on "such an ordinary day," the protagonist, a somewhat self-involved human rights worker named Annie, is huddled terrified in a jeep barreling down a road littered with corpses and pieces of corpses. One woman runs up to the vehicle, pleading for help; the jeep continues on, but not before Annie sees the woman felled by a man with a machete. The sight of this one woman will, we realize, torment Annie for years.

It says much about her skill as a writer that Stone can seamlessly weave this horror with the complications of Annie's adolescently passionate affair with Jean-Pierre, a Tutsi government official, and the news that her mother has contracted a possibly terminal cancer. Stone keeps all of these plots and subplots remarkably in focus. The dreadful, frustrating, but ordinary progress of Annie's mother's disease is juxtaposed with the unbelievable, unacceptable slaughter of members of Jean-Pierre's family. His well-behaved nieces and nephews stand in stark contrast to the indulged offspring of Annie's sisters the bitter Margaret, struggling with caring for their mother; her rebellious daughter and indifferent husband; and the loving but ditzy Lizzie, who believes in crystals and past life regression. Stone lucidly compares the suffocating traditionalism of Burundians and the sometimes unanchored freedoms of Americans. She also manages to capture Burundian resignation and American efficiency, as when Jean-Pierre's sister Christine is astonished by the concept of day planners.

Stone's style is clear and unadorned, but interspersed with descriptive gems like this one: "The airport was a series of white domes like a row of duck egg tops." After the massacre, Annie returns to her northern California home to find a kitchen "with an air of discombobulating normality. A few dishes in the sink, cartoons taped to the refrigerator, a jar of jam still on the table." Most people will never find themselves in the center of genocide, but Stone makes us feel the horror of it, even in the midst of the everyday.

 

A ghastly scene in Sarah Stone's fascinating first novel, The True Sources of the Nile, starkly illustrates the saying that one death is a tragedy and a million are a statistic. At the beginning of a shocking massacre in the African nation of Burundi, on "such an ordinary day," the protagonist, a somewhat self-involved human […]
Fiction

Charting the cost of fame

Review by Arlene McKanic

Susan Perabo's first novel, The Broken Places, poses the intriguing question of whether success and celebrity can be just as damaging as great failure and obscurity. The story is told through the eyes of Paul, the 12-year-old son of fireman Sonny and his beautiful, prickly schoolteacher wife Laura. When Ian Finch, one of the nastier kids from the local high school, gets trapped under a collapsed house he was building—a bomb seems to have prematurely gone off—Sonny rescues him and becomes a national celebrity. It's a newfound notoriety that seems to unhinge the otherwise affable and burly fireman.

Meanwhile, a brush with death and the ordeal of getting his foot axed off to free him from a deathtrap has done nothing to mellow the contemptible Ian, a kid with a swastika tattooed on his back and a propensity for wearing trench coats. Ian's sarcasm and lack of gratitude persists even when he and Sonny and Paul are flown to California to watch the filming of a movie about the incident. Moreover, Ian seems to have a hold over Sonny that both the reader and Paul find alarming and inexplicable.

Paul is a well-behaved, intelligent and athletic only child used to a lifetime of his parents' full attention. Sonny's sudden bond with a boy regarded by Paul and much of the rest of their town as a "goner" rouses his understandable jealousy. Perabo, who has previously written a collection of short stories, tells the tale in a matter of fact voice that still manages to engender dread in the reader; something bad appears to be lurking just around the corner. Her evocation of a boy on the edge of adolescence living in a small and close-knit town that still has one foot in the 1950s is remarkable. Her description of Sonny is heartbreaking. He's a good and dutiful man who finds himself in a situation for which he is trained, but with consequences he couldn't have expected.

The Broken Places is a moving evocation of the lies and myths families tell each other, the arbitrariness of fate and the inevitable, necessary pain of a child who comes to see his father and others as real, flawed human beings.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

 

Susan Perabo's first novel, The Broken Places, poses the intriguing question of whether success and celebrity can be just as damaging as great failure and obscurity.

Fiction

Sapphire

Interview by Arlene McKanic

It has been 15 years since you wrote about Precious Jones in Push. What inspired you to tell her son's story? Was this something you had in mind before the movie version of Precious' story came out?
The Kid is not a sequel in a traditional sense in that we don’t enter into and follow up on the life of Precious Jones. It is a sequel in the sense it continues to look at the profound and devastating effects of AIDS on the African-American community. I would posit that AIDS/HIV has hit us as hard as slavery in some ways and that the way AIDS has been dealt with in the black community has been directly related to our disenfranchised position in American society. African-American women who were diagnosed with AIDS at the time Push was being written were many times more likely to be dead within months of their diagnosis than gay white men who were diagnosed at the same time. I believe that was the result of racism. People like the gay white male activist Andrew Sullivan said things to the effect of, if there is to be a triage for the dispensing of antiviral drugs they should go first to gay white men who have and do contribute so much to society as opposed to poor blacks who don’t even know what has hit them. One reason I wrote Push was to show how “precious” those poor blacks might be if given an opportunity to live. The Kid resonates on many levels and has many reasons for being and indeed one of them is to show the continuing impact of the loss of our “precious” one(s).

I started working on The Kid (or The History of the Future as I was calling it, among other things, back then) many years ago. So “the kid” was definitely there before the movie, but I might have still been “working on my novel” to this day had it not been for many outside fortuitous events in my life; the movie was definitely among them. 

The Kid can be a rather grueling book. How did you prepare psychologically to write it?
I don’t know if one prepares psychologically so much as one prepares intellectually and even physically. I remember a favorite professor at Brooklyn College, James Merritt, who had written about the Romantics poets, talking excitedly about actually walking around Grasmere Lake where Wordsworth and Coleridge had walked. That became important to me, the concreteness of physical action—walking with attention—I walked Harlem. There’s a fascinating book (dated, but it served my purposes) The Geology of New York that gives you a sense of what you’re walking on, what’s underneath your feet, underneath the concrete, when you walk the streets of New York. Evidently there’s a fault that runs through northern Manhattan, Harlem. And even though I had lived in Harlem, I lined up with the German and Japanese tourists and took walking tours of Harlem trying to find out the places Langston Hughes had lived and where this or that historic place had been. I worked with an eighth-grade teacher’s earth science class teaching them how journals could be used in the middle-school science classroom and went on a city “earth walk” with them. 

I read texts like Shengold’s Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, Brunner/Mazel Clinical Psychiatry Series No. 1: The Child Molester, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, The Betrayal Trauma: The Logic Of Forgetting Childhood Abuse by Jennifer J. Freyd, and Young Men Who Have Sexually Abused by A. Durham from the NSPCC/Wiley series that explores current issues relating to the prevention of child abuse. (There is no dearth of written material out there, as a fiction writer and non-clinician the challenge is choosing what to read not finding material to read.) I went to school; I enrolled in seminars on the works of Richard Wright and Dostoevsky. I’ve studied dance. I spent hours at the Bodies exhibit when it opened. I have taken college level classes in anatomy and physiology, anatomy and kinesiology, choreography and dance history. Zora Neal Hurston said, "to know there you got to go there"! I went to Pat Hall, the famous Afro-Haitian dance teacher, and to Bernadine Jennings (who taught for years at the dance center in Harlem mentioned in the book) and took their classes. I bought tickets to Ailey, ABT, Savion Glover. I went to see snippets of films that showed African-American tappers (who never got the big movies parts like Fred Astaire and hence their contributions to American dance while imitated were never acknowledged). 

All that, I think was a “preparation”, and while not “psychological”, it laid a foundation so that the hard psychological truths that would be revealed in writing the novel had a context and were not reduced to exhibitionism.

How did you capture the voice and thoughts of a teenaged boy so well?

I think it was desire. I wanted him to be known! And the only way he was going to be known, this particular little boy, was through me. So, again I put in the time, I listened. I wasn’t always sure I had “it," the voice; but I kept working. This was a place I had to have faith, I mean I couldn’t know what it is to be a little boy but I had to believe a boy’s voice could come to me or allow itself to be “captured” by me. I also put the focus on connecting with him when he was little and not so filled with rage and hurt. So when I did have to show him engaged in some very questionable and outright bad behaviors I, as a writer, was also connected to that part of him that had been an innocent little boy

Why is Abdul drawn to dance (as opposed to astrophysics or anything else)?
Almost from the moment Abdul’s mother dies his body goes from being a location of connection and pleasure to being one of pain, betrayal, and disconnection. One of the things I wanted to do was show how pain breaks the connection one has to one’s own body and by extension the connection one has to the world. But I also wanted to show how that connection can be rebuilt, re-established, and nurtured. I did not think “astrophysics” or even painting or photography (for a minute I had thought of Abdul having a camera or notebook and “recording” his environment and through that means understanding his life). These things might have been interesting but would they have restored the site—the child body, the black male body, his body—that had been the recipient of so much pain. While astrophysics probably wasn’t going to do that for him, dance did.

Dance enables him to bear reality: “once I get warmed up and moving I’ll get over the pain.”

Dance takes him out of a painful past and a frightening future and connects him to the now: “You’re off Abdul! Listen to the drum, come down on the one!” [His teacher tells him] “Shit! I get back on the beat put everything out of my head except the drums.”

Dance connects him with himself: “I move on out, dancing fast. . . . I go with what I feel . . .” [emphasis added]

Through dance the primal connection with his mother/the earth/ humankind is, if only fleetingly, restored: “My body is not stiff or tight, [when he’s actually dancing as opposed to just warming up or doing exercises] I’m like my mom, soft, dark, and beautiful . . . I feel her kiss, kiss her lips . . .”

Most importantly dance defies the authority of the trauma that’s been inflicted on him to be the sole determiner of his reality. Dance gives him back, in a healthy way, some of the power abuse has robbed him of: “[dancing] my body is not a stranger, not a traitor tricked by white homos in black robes, not a little boy in a hospital bed . . . here [dancing] my body is my own . . . here I got a mother.” 

Why did you name the school St. Ailanthus? Isn’t that the name of a tree?
Most Catholic schools or institutions are named after saints. Had I named the school in the novel after a real saint it might have looked as if I was pointing fingers at a specific school or boy’s home which I most decidedly was not. I think for most readers St Ailanthus will just seem to be a saint they’ve never heard of before.

Ailanthus is a tree, also known as the Tree of Heaven, it is the tree referred to in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ailanthus has also been called the Ghetto Palm because it’s frequently found in areas where few trees can survive. It is one of the most pollution-tolerant of tree species; evidently its leaves absorb sulfur dioxide. It can withstand cement dust, mercury, and coal tar. The Tree of Heaven thrives in hell. Unfortunately it is a bit of hell itself, actually earning the nickname Tree from Hell because it is malodorous, aggressively invasive and hard to eradicate, and its roots produce a poison that inhibits the growth of other plants. 

The end feels like a cliffhanger. Any plans for a sequel?
Actually I don’t see the last chapter or the ending as a “cliffhanger." It’s not a happily ever after or he dies or is doomed etc. The reader goes through a dark night of the soul with Abdul in a real or imagined place of ever lit and blindingly bright darkness. With the help of Dr See Abdul confronts the only part of the vicious cycle abuse he has total control over, that which he does to others. We never know what is the truth or what are his guilt ridden tortured imaginings, but a confession of sorts emerges, whether it is “real” or whether the events if his past have filled him with a need to construct a false reality where he has the power to be as brutal to others as they have been to him. 

Too much happens at the end to talk about right now, but he is freed from the real or imagined hell he finds himself in. One of his last acts before he is freed, inadvertent though it was, was to shatter the artificial lights (and those could symbolize almost any of the false gods he’s been oppressed by) that have cut him off from nature (his own and the world’s!). When the book ends he’s free to really be an artist (or anything else he wants to be), something “Slavery Days” (his great-grandmother) and his mother never had a chance to do. 

You're also a poet. Do you still write poetry, or do you consider yourself more of a novelist now?
I used to think of myself as a poet who wrote a novel. Now I think of myself as a really old “emerging” novelist. I’m making fun of myself there, but seriously, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, God willing, write stories.

Both The Kid and Push deal with the legacy of abuse. Judging by your writing, it would seem that you believe breaking free of that legacy is close to impossible. Why do you feel compelled to tell these sorts of stories?
Quite to the contrary, I feel it is entirely possible to break free of the legacy of abuse. It is possible but not easy. I feel that one way to break free of the legacy of abuse is to tell the story. Silence is not just a collaborator with evil; it is, I believe, a perpetrator, of evil. 

 

It has been 15 years since you wrote about Precious Jones in Push. What inspired you to tell her son's story? Was this something you had in mind before the movie version of Precious' story came out? The Kid is not a sequel in a traditional sense in that we don’t enter into and follow […]
FictionPopular FictionDebut Fiction

Claire Gibson

Interview by Arlene McKanic

Some readers might be wary of picking up a book like Beyond the Point. Much of the story is set at West Point, so you probably think you’re going to slog through pages of endless boot camp and gung-ho teenagers. That the story begins in those golden months before 9/11 only adds to this. You know what’s coming; the grind and tedium of military school followed by the horrors of wars fought by kids who came to the Point thinking they will deploy to Tuscany. But in Claire Gibson’s moving exploration of grief and friendship, you don’t know what’s coming. This is the book’s genius.

The novel centers on three friends. Hannah is sweet, dutiful and pious. She and her husband, Tim, even wait until they’re married to have sex. Dani is whip-smart, ambitious and tough as she navigates both the nonsense that comes with being a female cadet at West Point and the subtle and overt racism that comes with being a woman of color. Avery is a mess. She’s frequently a fair-weather friend and consistently picks men who mistreat her. Life takes each young woman to unexpected places, and it is and is not because of 9/11. We asked Gibson to share her insight into West Point (where she was born and raised), her characters and the nature of female friendship.

What was the inspiration behind this book?
I began freelance writing full time in 2012. I loved writing for newspapers and magazines, but I couldn't kick the gut feeling that I was supposed to write a novel, and every time I imagined writing a novel, I kept thinking about my childhood home, West Point, and the incredible women there. In 2013, a group of women West Point graduates asked if I’d be interested in interviewing them for a possible story. I started with four interviews, which quickly blossomed into more than 20. And the more women I spoke to, the more confident I was that I was meant to write their experiences down as a novel—something that every person could engage with, whether they were familiar with West Point or not.

What was it like to be born and raised at West Point?
West Point is a small, tight-knit community located on the Hudson River in upstate New York, just 50 miles north of New York City. A prestigious four-year college, it also doubles as a training ground for the U.S. Army’s next generation of officers. The buildings look like castles. West Point began admitting women in 1976, so by the time I lived there, women were very much a part of the student body, albeit still a minority. Those women became my mentors and friends, and I looked up to them so much. They took time out of their very busy schedules to know me and to tell me that they cared about me. I’ll never be able to repay them fully.

What did you hope to capture through the stories of the three women in Beyond the Point?
The first few pages of Beyond the Point might seem to follow a normal “college” storyline, as Dani McNalley, Avery Adams and Hannah Speer forge an unlikely friendship which they nickname the “cult.” But that’s where the similarities to other college tales ends. The rigors of West Point are unlike any other college or university, and after the tragedy of 9/11, the women must face down enemies both external and internal as they adjust to life after college, which for them includes the ordinary stresses of career, love and heartbreak, along with the added pressure of war. My hope is that readers connect with these three women and feel that, in the end, they could be a part of the “cult.”

Friendship is such an important theme throughout Beyond the Point. Did your writing of this novel affect your own friendships with the women in your life? If so, how?
Writing this novel definitely impacted my friendships. First of all, over the course of the four years it took me to write the novel, I became extremely close with many of the women that inspired its pages. I knew those women when I was a child, but now am so privileged to call them friends as an adult. Perhaps more importantly, seeing how they supported one another during the most challenging years of their lives has helped me be a more intentional friend. I have learned the power of being present, available, and offering concrete help when things are hard. I’ve also been a grateful recipient of that help.

Why is the story set just before and after 9/11? And as a self-described “Army brat,” how did 9/11 impact your life and family?
It’s so hard to talk about 9/11, because it’s a tragedy that struck every American in so many different but equally horrific ways. At West Point, there was an eerie sense of calm and purpose that settled over our community in the days after those attacks. Even though I was only 15 years old, I knew that everyone we loved—every cadet my father taught and my mother fed at our house—would eventually be heading to war. As I went on to college and beyond, and the wars continued raging, many men and women we knew were killed in action. I think most Americans can operate without really thinking about the military or our currently conflicts. I am always thinking about service members—not because I’m more patriotic. Just because many of them are still my family and friends.

What was the hardest part about writing Beyond the Point? What was most enjoyable?
For me, the greatest challenge was learning to tell my own critical voice to step aside. You need that critical voice when you’re editing—but you don’t need it while you’re writing. One time, my counselor encouraged me to close my eyes and to tell the critical voice, “Thank you for what you’re trying to do. I know you want this to be really really good. But I don’t need you just yet. Step aside, and I’ll call you back when I need you.” Then I could actually get to work writing. It was kind of woo woo, but also kind of revolutionary. The most enjoyable part was writing scenes that left me in tears, staring at the computer screen. Writers get to take readers on an emotional journey, but the writer has to take that journey first.

What do you hope readers will take away from Beyond the Point?
I hope readers love the story, love the characters and walk away feeling deeply connected, grateful and inspired by the power of female friendship.

 

Author photo by Lindsey Rome

In Claire Gibson’s moving exploration of grief and friendship, you don’t know what’s coming. This is the book’s genius.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Arctic Fury

Review by Arlene McKanic

The real Lady Jane Franklin sponsored a number of expeditions to find her explorer husband, Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin, after he and his men went missing in the Arctic. Though there’s no record of an all-female expedition, that hasn’t stopped Greer Macallister from writing a cracking good story about one in her fourth novel, The Arctic Fury.

Virginia Reeve is the leader of the all-female company, and when the book opens, she’s on trial for the murder of one of its members. The year is 1853, and the courthouse is in Boston, though the alleged homicide happened not far from the North Pole. Big-hearted Virginia is strong and rough around the edges, and much of her fortitude is born of trauma, having lived through both the horrific winter of 1846–47 and the accidental death of her mentor, a pathfinder named Ames whom she loved with a platonic fervor.

Virginia’s crew is motley enough. Among them are a woman who handles the sled dogs, a cartographer, an illustrator, a writer, a ladies’ maid and her pampered mistress, Caprice. Though Caprice and Virginia cross swords early on, the hardships of their trek allow them to value each other’s qualities.

Macallister’s book, written in prose as crisp as an Arctic summer, reminds us that women had all kinds of adventures during this period, from heading out into the frontier to holding conventions for women’s rights and writing antislavery books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Arctic Fury is a tribute to one young woman’s leadership and genius for survival.

The real Lady Jane Franklin sponsored a number of expeditions to find her explorer husband, Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin, after he and his men went missing in the Arctic. Though there’s no record of an all-female expedition, that hasn’t stopped Greer Macallister from writing a cracking good story about one in her fourth novel, The Arctic Fury.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features