It was a preternaturally sunny afternoon in the City. But that didn’t stop Scott and me from checking out Tayari Jones at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books. Jones, who initially attracted my attention when I learned that her next-door neighbor was Richard Powers, was there for the final stop on her book tour to support her second novel, The Untelling. Told from the perspective of a young girl who copes with the effects of a car accident on a broken family in Atlanta, Jones started the novel almost immediately after her first novel, Leaving Atlanta.
Jones, who is 34, read two passages from the book: the first segment setting up the family in question and the second involving a revelation on Halloween night. She read in a warm and mellifluous voice that evoked the purity of childhood and young adulthood covered within the novel (and wasn’t bad at all for a first book tour out). JOnes had recently rebounded from a two-week bout with laryngitis. Apparently, she had been conducting her readings without drinking any water. When she was kind enough to sign my book to “Ed the Champion,” I urged Jones to drink more water while on the road.
Jones started writing The Untelling in 2000. It took three and a half years to finish, with the last fifty pages coming out of her during the last year. The novel emerged when she started thinking about home ownership, specifically with the often unspoken issue of single women assuming “house power.” Jones was curious about how families assume multiple debts to take on a house. Since she had turned thirty near the beginning of writing The Untelling, these thoughts, along with the marital ambition that often plagues people around twenty-nine, had her focusing her instincts into her novel. She pointed out that marriage often prevents people from asking about parents, because a married person, when asked about her life, can simply point to her spouse and avoid the question of parents and siblings altogether.
Jones said that she is working on a third novel “about bigamy” and didn’t reveal much. But she did point out that in order for bigamy to work, one family would have to be complicit.
Lauren Cerand has informed me that Jones has an opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about writing her first novel.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (