[CW-Grad] Fwd: for all faculty and grad students

[Tiffany Long]

><http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207334.html>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/22/AR2010112207334.html
>
>BOOK WORLD
>'Candle': Flickers of despai! ! r, hope in lives in the shadows
>By Wendy Smith
>Tuesday, November 23, 2010
>TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM
>By Susan Straight
>Pantheon. 320 pp. $25.95
>Americans don't generally deal well with the fraught subjects of 
>race and class, often reduced in our public discourse to slogans and 
>platitudes. But in six novels, including the 2001 
><http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2001.html>Error! Hyperlink reference 
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>"<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385722613?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-style-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0385722613>Error! 
>Hyperlink reference not valid.," Susan Straight has made it her 
>literary mission to add nuance and empathy to the discussion. 
>Exploring the lives of African Americans and undocumented 
>immigrants, she doesn't airbrush the crime and substance abuse 
>endemic in impoverished communities, but she reminds us that these 
>are communities, anchored in family ties and filled with 
>hardworking, law-abiding people who understand all too well why some 
>in their midst succumb to destructive despair. Straight's 
><http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307379140?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-style-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307379140>Error! 
>Hyperlink reference not valid. examines the nature of community 
>itself, revealing its strength and limitations through the odyssey 
>of a woman with her feet uneasily planted in two worlds.
>Fantine Antoine comes from Sarrat, a tiny Southern California 
>enclave built by her father as a refuge from racial violence. In 
>1958, Fantine's mother and four other 16-year-old girls were sent 
>west from their home town because a white man had raped three of 
>them and boasted he would get the other two. Things hadn't changed 
>that much in rural Louisiana since Fantine's enslaved ancestor 
>Marie-Therese was given by her owner as a sexual favor to a white 
>man whose child she then bore (a tale related by Straight in "A 
>Million Nightingales"). "It was my mother who told me the story," 
>says Fantine, "so that I would stay home, safe, and never trust the 
>outside world, or the white people in that world."
>Instead, Fantine went to college and remade herself as FX Antoine, a 
>successful travel writer who takes sardonic amusement in her 
>professional contacts' attempts to guess the origins of her taupe 
>skin and wavy hair. Pushing 40 when her narrative begins in late 
>August 2005, FX is the classic, self-invented American. She lives in 
>a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood, her apartment decorated with 
>mementoes from far-flung assignments. Her best friend is a gay white 
>photographer, himself from a blue-collar background, who understands 
>why FX seldom makes the 62-mile drive to Sarrat. Like her, he has 
>rejected the guiding principle of a fiercely protective, 
>self-enclosed clan that believes the only important things in life 
>are "the fire - the table - the tribe. There was nothing else 
>outside the circle that mattered."
>Straight poignantly evokes the mixed emotions of someone who has 
>seized the opportunity to move outside that home circle. For her 
>mother, Fantine admits, "my absence was almost as unforgivable as 
>drug addiction or imprisonment." Within her family, good girls, such 
>as her sister-in-law Clarette, become correctional officers; lost 
>girls like her childhood friend Glorette become crackheads and get 
>killed. No one in Sarrat reads the glossy magazines that publish FX; 
>her accomplishments are unknown to them. But leaving behind her past 
>means that her true self is unknown to those who know only FX. "I 
>was floating. I was invisible," she thinks.
>That isn't possible for her godson Victor, Glorette's son. He's a 
>bright kid, eager for the intellectual pleasures and the wider world 
>that lured FX away from her tribe; he's done well in community 
>college, and FX is urging him to apply to four-year schools. But he 
>doesn't have his godmother's racially indeterminate skin and hair. 
>When members of the privileged world Victor wants to enter see him 
>with his drug-dealing friends, they see only threatening black men. 
>The restrictions imposed by race and class are intertwined but not 
>the same; accents can be suppressed, clothes can be upscaled, but 
>color is a marker for life.
>When Victor's friends involve him in a murder, the three flee to 
>Louisiana, and Fantine follows with her father. Their journey 
>becomes a voyage into the past, all the way back to Plaquemines 
>Parish at the mouth of the Mississippi, site of the plantation where 
>Marie-Therese labored. As they frantically search for Victor, 
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/Katrina/>Error! 
>Hyperlink reference not valid. guts Louisiana - capping a plot rife 
>with shootings and revelations of past violence that occasionally 
>seem designed to make a political point.
>Straight's lapses into didactic melodrama are redeemed, however, by 
>her textured portrait of the African American experience and her 
>brilliantly specific language. The voices here ring absolutely true, 
>from the stoic, French-inflected cadences of Fantine's father to the 
>gangsta-wannabe lingo and Victor's recital of lyrics from "Baba 
>O'Riley" that capture his conflicted soul. Meaning comes from the 
>sound and weight of words as well as their content.
>And words echo down the centuries, like the phrase reiterated 
>throughout "A Million Nightingales" that gives this novel its title. 
>"Take one candle light a room" was Marie-Therese's defiant 
>affirmation that her daughter, conceived from rape, brightened her 
>enslaved existence. Here it becomes a mandate for Fantine, who 
>finally sees her way clear to honoring her family's history while 
>shining a light toward a different future for herself and her 
>godson. Layering the rich particulars of African American life into 
>a classic tale of individual desires straining against collective 
>constraints, Straight adds another complex, compassionate 
>achievement to her distinguished body of work.
>Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar, frequently 
>reviews books for The Post.
>
>
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