Jonis Agee Spins The River Wife's Tale

Jonis Agee Spins The River Wife’s Tale

A Review by Jia Gayles

Has a book ever made you forget your life? Did the phone call go unanswered or the email unchecked? Only a master storyteller can spin a tale so intricate that you willingly succumb to its sticky web, and Jonis Agee has accomplished this feat with her first foray into historical fiction – The River Wife. The Nebraska native is the Adele Hall Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and it was her childhood memories of summering near the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri that inspired her to create a vivid three-dimensional world of brazen, complicated, cursed and beautiful women living on the early 19^th century frontier.

The New York Times Book Review declared Agee, “a gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape.” In this novel, our forest guide is Hedie, a young naïve bride settling into life on Jacques’ Landing with her bootlegging husband Clement Ducharme. As her husband trolls the town’s underbelly late into the night, Hedie finds refuge in the forgotten journals of her “river wife” ancestors Annie Lark, Omah, Laura and Maddie.

The massive New Madrid earthquake of 1812 changed the topography of Missouri forever in the formation of new lakes, sandboils and riverbends in the mighty Mississippi. Annie Lark’s story begins trapped underneath a fallen beam in her family’s abandoned cabin. Convinced the Day of Reckoning had come to New Madrid, Annie’s family hurriedly runs from the wrecked town, leaving her to die alone. Jacques Ducharme, a crude French fur trapper, happens upon Annie as he scavenges her cabin. Taken with her, he hazards the unsettled structure and engineers his ox-driven cart to pull her out.

After a few uneventful years of nomadic frontier life (save the errant grizzly bear), the impending arrival of their first child drives Jacques and Annie to settle down along the Mississippi River. Jacques sees an opportunity to garner business from the nearby river traffic and opens an inn. Money awakens insatiable greed in Annie’s husband, which crescendo in one terrible, gruesome night – irrevocably changing their relationship. After that night, Annie is left broken but defiantly seeks out her own interests in science and the arts. She even entertains a passing flirtation with famed ornithologist, John James Audubon. After her untimely death, she remains a ghostly apparition, haunting her descendants and remaining Jacques’ one great love.

Omah follows in Annie’s footsteps, crowned as the new “river wife” after her parents’ death leaves the sixteen-year old freed slave alone in the world. Jacques offers the teenager room, board and protection. Omah realizes the high price for living at Jacques’ Landing when she is recruited to help raid a passing riverboat. Her new career as Jacques partner-in-crime begins. Omah’s platonic relationship with Jacques is borne out of respect and deep loyalty; perhaps the only reason she somewhat escapes the cursed Ducharme legacy.

Maddie Ducharme is spawned from the May-December union of Jacques and his second wife, Laura Shut. Laura is an unabashed goldigger who married the old river pirate for his rumored ill-begotten treasures. Not suited to solitary river life, Laura leaves Jacques’ Landing to quench her wanderlust. But the trip precipitates Laura’s quick end. Maddie Ducharme grows up motherless, and strives unsuccessfully to bring an end to the cursed Ducharme legacy. In an interview with BookPage, Agee shares that the original novel clocked in at 700 pages. Maddie and Laura’s stories are the shortest in the book, making them easily identifiable as the most wounded victim’s on the editor’s chopping block.

Annie Lark, Omah, Laura, Maddie and Hedie are connected by Jacques Ducharme, but he is merely the needle that pierces the dense cloth of their collective experience. The women are front and center of the novel, as Agee pulls back layer after layer revealing the complex juxtaposition of depression, bisexuality, fragility, passion, intelligence and perseverance. Each layer reveals the true essence of real women, and human-kind in general, who are perfect in their imperfections. As the karmic spell continues to play out, a sort of 19^th century version of Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around…Comes Back Around,” each women confronts the effects of loving Jacques Ducharme, a mysterious, ageless man with a dark heart and brilliant mind. But make no mistake; this is no saccharine historical romance with requisite burning loins and fainting heroines.

Jonis Agee has been distinguished with three Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times – Strange Angels, Bend This Heart and Sweet Eyes. She is a Gold Award winner and recipient of the Loft-McNight Award of Distinction and the NEA grant in fiction. Her novel Weight of Dreams received the Nebraska Book Award.

Book of Marie by Terry Kay

A review of Terry Kay's new novel

by

James Stevens

Terry Kay has crafted a beautiful, realistic look at the people of his native state of Georgia and their reactions to the arrival of integration and the many changes it brought to their lives. The citizens of Overton, GA, a small rural community with a class C high school, are seen as teenagers in the 1950s, and again at their 50th high school reunion.

Marie, an outsider from the North who joins the senior class in 1954, is an outspoken critic of all things Southern, and is shunned by her class members except for Cole, the popular football quarterback and very traditional Southern male. Despite their cultural differences, an unexplained attraction emerges.

After their graduation and separation, their strange friendship is continued and revealed through the letters they exchange as the years pass. The arrival of the 50th Reunion vividly shows the changes that have occurred in Overton because of integration and civil rights, and the direct effect it has had on the lives of the class of 1954.

Through his many brilliantly developed characters Kay also addresses the issues of male aging, and the importance of place and friendship in creating a satisfactory life.

The Book of Marie has captured a sometimes forgotten generation and its role in history.It is a stunning discovery. Terry Kay has crafted a beautiful, realistic look at the people of his native state of Georgia and their reactions to the arrival of integration and the many changes it brought to their lives. The citizens of Overton, GA, a small rural community with a class C high school, are seen as teenagers in the 1950s, and again at their 50th high school reunion.

Marie, an outsider from the North who joins the senior class in 1954, is an outspoken critic of all things Southern, and is shunned by her class members except for Cole, the popular football quarterback and very traditional Southern male. Despite their cultural differences, an unexplained attraction emerges.

After their graduation and separation, their strange friendship is continued and revealed through the letters they exchange as the years pass. The arrival of the 50th Reunion vividly shows the changes that have occurred in Overton because of integration and civil rights, and the direct effect it has had on the lives of the class of 1954.

Through his many brilliantly developed characters Kay also addresses the issues of male aging, and the importance of place and friendship in creating a satisfactory life.

The Book of Marie has captured a sometimes forgotten generation and its role in history.It is a stunning discovery.

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

A Review By Lisa Heidle

In 1948, fifty-seven years before Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones would resurrect Truman Capote with lisping and drawling syntax for this generation, Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, casting light on one of the 20^th centuries most controversial and engaging writers.

Being a Capote fan, I picked up Other Voices, Other Rooms, a self-admitted semi-autobiographical account of Capote’s childhood, expecting the same quirky, on the fringe characters that grace the majority of the man’s work, and wasn’t disappointed. Joel Knox, a thirteen-year-old boy who has recently lost his mother, is sent to live with the father he’s never known. Once arriving in the small town of Noon City, Capote inundates Joel with a cast of misfits who are as hungry for a new witness to their eccentric behavior as Joel is for a place to belong. He is driven to Skully’s Landing, his father’s home, by Jesus Fever, a hundred year old dwarf, is greeted by Miss Amy, his father’s mentally unstable wife as she beats a bluejay to death with a poker, and befriends the traumatized housekeeper, Zoo, whose only wish in life is to see snow.

The novel was even more compelling due to its autobiographical nature. Capote dances Joel to the edge of each budding relationship, only to pull him back before anything that can’t be undone is acted upon. Each time he narrowly escapes being emotionally marred, I couldn’t help but envision a young Truman, as naïve and hapless as the young Joel, sidestepping the mental and emotional miscreants he had been placed in the care of. When Joel becomes friends with the local wild child Idabel, we assume a sweet romance will develop between the two, but Capote reminds us that no one truly knows the heart of another when we learn Idabel is in love with the Miss Wisteria, a small person from the traveling side-show. After meeting cousin Randolph flitting through the pages in silk pajamas and ringlet curls, I had a better understanding of what Capote meant when he stated after rereading the novel that his “self-deception was unpardonable.”

My image of Capote that has been created over the years, a crudely drawn caricature in an open silk robe, thick, black-framed glasses engulfing a round face, a martini glass in one hand, notebook and pen in the other, has been replaced after reading Other Voices, Other Rooms. An unaffected version, full of curiosity and want, now shadows the man, gifting readers with an insight into the resourceful spirit and fledgling imagination of one of America’s rare, first-rate storytellers.

Stephen L. Carter’s New England White Illuminates

New England White is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. After I took a wrong turn toward the African-American section and misguidedly thumbed through the ABC’s of Borders’ fiction stacks, I finally made the connection that the newest novel from the widely hailed author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and Yale law scholar, Stephen L. Carter, was located in the Mystery/Thriller section. I could heed my embarrassment in not recognizing the accomplishments of my own fellow member of the “darker nation” (a term frequently used by Carter to delineate African-Americans), and blame it on the fact I was worn-out from a long day at the office. But perhaps it was my own narrow-minded subconscious, blocking the possibility that a successful Black author would be occupying expensive, forward-facing real estate in the curious suspense category. Whatever the case, the 550+ pages to me weighed heavy as a brick in my less-than-muscular arms; but I took up the challenge and settled in for a surprisingly piercing examination of the intersections of race and class in modern America – deceptively presented via an old-fashioned whodunit.

In New England White, Carter breathes life into previously minor characters, Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, who appeared in his first novel The Emperor of Ocean Park. This upwardly mobile couple is the realization of W.E.B. Dubois’ Talented Tenth concept; both firmly ensconced in the edified black bourgeoisie by virtue of Lemaster’s uncompromising ambition and Julia’s historical familial ties, seemingly without the aid of Carter’s termed “paler nation.” Ironically, however, we learn in the end it is because of an unspeakable confidence with Lemaster’s three White college roommates, two of which have gone on to the Senate and White House; which propels the Carlyle family and the mysterious Emperyals organization to the oft unexplored nether regions of unchecked power. But I am getting ahead of myself…

Barbadian-born, Lemaster, is the president of fictional Kepler University. His family resides in the lily-white community of Tyler’s Landing, whose residents keep a close eye on the rising number of “colored families” (five in a town of 3,000) amongst their ranks. A sharp intellect that is maddeningly insane in his focus on honor and single-minded in his devotion to strict Anglican tradition, Lemaster is a formidable opponent for his time-weathered wife. Julia feels caged by the perfect illusion of family life that she has helped design; and it is Julia who takes on the challenge of pursuing the truth, no matter how unsettling to her family, when the Carlyle’s Cadillac Escalade veers off an icy country road, leading to the grim discovery of Kellen Zant’s body in a nearby ditch.

Zant was a brilliant economics professor who co-authored a famous economic theorem; but more interestingly, he was Julia’s slick, heart-breaker of an ex-lover from more than two-decades before who unfailingly, if not admirably, professed his love throughout the years. The mystery of Zant’s murder grows stranger still when it is reveled that he left clues for Julia’s eyes only cloaked in economic terms, such as, catching the surplus and unloading the inventory, mysterious anagrams scribbled on a flimsy business card and hidden messages in the antiquated mirrors that Julia loves to collect. Though she is an unwitting sleuth, Julia finds herself unable to stop searching for answers because some of her ex-lover’s clues lead back to own brilliant, yet frighteningly disturbed teenage daughter Vanessa.

Vanessa is obsessed with the 30-year old murder of Gina Joule. Her fixation began with a term paper examining the innocence of a young black man, Deshaun; who was accused of the crime and subsequently murdered by racist white cops. The teenager is desperate, almost to the point of ridiculous, to disprove anyone of the notion that Deshaun was innocent. She speaks to the dead girl, to the utter dismay and embarrassment of her parents, and disappears for large chunks of time to find proof of Deshaun’s guilt.

Through interaction with the shady characters Kellen contacted before his death, Julia finds out that the economics professor had information on the Joule murder and Lemaster’s corrupt ties to his White college friends and a mysterious Harlem brotherhood, the Emperyals.

The Emperyals are so secretive, that members do not even claim to be so. Carter paints the organization as a deep-rooted network of the “darker nation,” which exercises its political power through a forced hand. Julia exposes her husband as a member of this elite organization and follows Kellen’s breadcrumb trail right back to her own front door.

“African America” has always made its own rules, created its own private clubs and organizations and, thus; has also generated its own tangled web of class and privilege outside White America’s disinterested gaze. Carter’s attacks on classism in “African America” illuminates a fact of the human condition: we all want to be better than our peers. Smarter, richer, prettier, etcetera, etcetera… Within “African America” the same kinds of conditions exist; which the author deftly explores in Julia’s journey to find Deshaun’s mother. The coiffed college president’s wife leaves the cloistered and picturesque Tyler’s Landing behind to find answers in Elm Harbor’s Nest neighborhood, home of the underprivileged type of folks she rarely, if ever, has contact with in her daily life.

The author also paints a fantastical picture of the Emperyal organizational having a major political influence, which allows Lemaster to have power over his college roommates, now a Senator and President. Carter’s obvious statement on politics is that “the darker nation” will only get the attention of the “paler” one should the latter have evidence to others wrongdoing. This is the author’s testament to the struggle to address race and class on a political canvas that more often than not prefers to let the subject fade into the forgettable background.

The beauty of this mystery was its ability to achieve a major publishing coup with characters from Carter’s beloved, “the darker nation,” at the helm of a bestseller. Though, at times, his prose lies heavy and cloying at the far reaches of your vocabulary (I will admit it – I pulled out my dictionary three times) and there is also the daunting task of dissecting economic theorems; the subject-matter is worthy of the journey. Lemaster and Julia are educated, rich and black; and Stephen Carter’s success sheds a blazing white light on this often overlooked and underappreciated part of American society.