When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man.
This makes the book uneasy to reconcile-whether as a polemic or a novel and then again there is no congruence between the Nat Turner who lived and died before the Civil War and the Nat Turner who seems to be a superimposition of the '60's, resurrected in some flagrantly modern scenes.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.
memories of his mother submitting to the white overseer of blonde Miss Emmaline sullied and "ravished" by her cousin, etc.). On the one hand Nat thinks many bitter, contemporary thoughts about the Negro's imputed intellectual, spiritual and biological (but not sexual) inferiority on the other hand, the novel is full of Yassuh-Massa survival stereotypes and situations from a much older literature (i.e. In the language of the law he's just an "animate chattel" although he had acquired the "lineaments not just of literacy out of knowledge" through one master who had educated him to be emancipated, then sold him because of economic pressures. "Nigger preacher," self-designated prophet, Nat is primarily a man who for the last half of his thirty-one years has nursed a "pure and obdurate" hatred for white men (and a less pure desire for their women). In the fulminating first person of Nat Turner, Just before he is to be killed, this reviews at black heat the "ruction" he incited-a mass murder and rape in the Virginia of 1831. Few first novels promised so much for a new writer as Styron's Faulknerian Lie Down in Darkness with only one flawed major book in between, now sixteen years later it is difficult to relate this to the early book except for the emotional charge of some of the writing, most effective when descriptive.
0 kommentar(er)
