It’s the mid-1960s, but in the rural Southern setting of this novel, the remnants of slavery are still evident; the aging white landowners occupy the plantation house, while the ten or fifteen black families live down in the old quarters. Racial issues come to the fore, but are anything but cut and dried, when a Creole man is killed in the quarters. When the sheriff shows up, he finds a young white woman and several old black men with shotguns all claiming responsibility for the death. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, from the small boy tasked with gathering the shotgun men to the white woman’s journalist fiance, to various ones of the old men (shades of Faulkner). All of this should make for an extremely compelling book; let’s say that it is compelling, but I wish (and my classmates did, too) that Gaines had carried out the sense of race and color variations that began the book out through the end–by the end it turned into much more of a black vs. white battle. The fact that the murdered man is Creole is fascinating; he’s treated as white, but there’s clearly a huge class and culture difference between the Creole community and the older white community. Unfortunately, these issues are not explored as well as they could be. Still, there’s a lot going on here, and the style is definitely evocative.
Above Average

A friend has been recommending this to me for months, and I finally found time to sit down with it. The main character, an amateur biographer, gets summoned by an eccentric novelist who wants her to write an official biography–throughout the years the novelist has given many imaginative versions of her own life, but now it seems she wants to tell the truth, which is more than a little strange. It’s quite well-written and interesting–part fictional literary memoir, part detective story, and all gothic mystery which owes more than a little to both Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Props to Setterfield for writing the surprise twist in such a way that I guessed it at the exact same second as the heroine.
Well Above Average

Calvino has been one of my favorite writers since I stumbled upon his book of pseudo-short stories, Invisible Cities, and Cosmicomics is similar in style and structure. It’s basically a series of vignettes based around personified mathematic principles. Yeah, I can’t wrap my mind around it either, and I’ve read it! It’s a radically different way of seeing the world and the order underneath it; some of the sections are lovely and fascinating, others are more incomprehensible. Generally, I enjoyed it a lot less than Invisible Cities because it was so abstract–I found it very hard to latch onto the word pictures he was drawing. But that could also be my lack of mathematical understanding to catch his terms and everything. Anyway, if you’re read other Calvino stuff (or people like Jorge Luis Borges), then give Cosmicomics a try. Otherwise, check out Invisible Cities or If on a winter’s night a traveler first.
Above Average

I enjoyed this much-maligned last novel by Hurston best of all. In a turn that many critics have denounced, she sets this one among white people and focuses much more on the marriage relationship than on racism, or self-actualization, or any of the things that preoccupied her in her other novels. However, in that close focus on that one marriage and the people who have to overcome inferiority complexes, patriarchal structures, and debilitating lack of communication, she really captivated me. If you haven’t read Hurston and want to, I actually recommend starting with this one instead of Their Eyes. It’ll get you into her style of looking at things without the difficult of the dialect, for one thing. But then, I’m also biased, because I really loved it.
Well Above Average