Death Comes for the Archbishop may be Cather's best work

Now I'm (re)reading Willa Cathers's 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is not really typical of her work but in some ways it could be her best novel. In this novel - about the attempts of the Catholic church in the early 19th century to bring to the Southwest, in particular the newly annexed New Mexico territory, the gospel - Cather gives some of her most beautiful writing (particularly accounts of the SW landscape and the ever-changing, dramatic weather), vivid development of character (notably the two central figures, Bishop Jean LaTour and his best friend and counterpart, Father Joseph Vaillant, but also many colorful and credible secondary characters), smart historical writing that never feels bookish or "quaint," and a series of terrific and sometimes terrifying adventure tales of survival, frontier justice, and life in a remote, almost primitive era. The novel - I'm about half-way through - consists of a series of sketches that could be read independently but work together to build for us a true sense of time and place and and of the people in the SW and their 3 cultures: Catholic (French, in this case), Spanish (Mexicans, suddenly finding themselves part of the U.S., Native American (the various pueblos in and around Santa Fe), and possibly even a 4th culture of westward-moving Americans on the frontier (Kit Carson, the famous scout, makes a few appearances). The adventures alone, though, make the novel truly engaging - notably the night the Bishop, seeking shelter from a blizzard, spent in a cave the Pecos tribe used for rituals (possibly snake worship, strange and spooky); the recollection of a Native uprising against the domain of a brutal and selfish priest, who gets tossed from the cliffs of the famous Acoma pueblo (a place fully worth a visit today, I can attest). The commitment and the faith of the two churchmen is moving, even to religious skeptics of today, and as we read deeper into this (relatively short) novel we see not only the dangers that they braved but the subtleties of church politics and the hardship of life - with no regular, easy means of communication across great distances - in early 1800s. We tend to think of Cather, at least early in her career, as a chronicle of life on the Prairie, and she's wrongly viewed sometimes as provincial and sentimental; this novel belies those presumptions and shows a side of Cather's vision not always recognized.

The intricately plotted and totally Scandinavian Out Stealing Horses, and a note on a New Yorker story

Per Petterson's 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, a surprise literary success in its time (how many other Norwegian novels have been best-sellers in the U.S.? Not many) holds up well, an intricately plotted story of a 63-year-old man who has more or less cut himself off from his family and from most social relations, living in a somewhat rundown cabin in far eastern Norway who, through a coincidental contact with a person from his past, finds himself wrestling with the trauma of his young years, in particular his father's unexplained abandonment and disappearance. There are many beautiful passages, particularly the descriptions of logging and a long horseback journey across the border into Sweden, but what makes the book stand out is the insigh tinto the personality of the narrator, Trond. The novel takes place across the "planes" of time: present day (Trond getting by in his relative isolation, various home-maintenance chores, awkward interactions w/ others, including his estranged daughter), 1948 (when Trond spent a summer working on logging and farming with his father; during this period - the central part of the novel - a young boy was accidentally shot to death his brother and Trond recognizes that his father may be in love with the wife of a neighbor), and 1945 (Trond learns that during the war his father and the wife-of-neighbor were involved with the Resistance). There are many dramatic events, but the novel is saturated in its Scandinavian reticence andgloom; it's amazing, though credible, that Trond accepts his fate and makes few or no inquiries about the disappearance of his father. The father's coldness and selfishness is equally amazing; the most startling section of the novel must be the letter his father writes to the family informing them that he will never return home, in the coldest and most clinical manner. By the end, we feel that we know the narrator quite well and we empathize with his isolation and his loss - but we also feel that there are aspects of his story that he can share w/ no one, that there's much he hasn't told us, or even told himself. He's perhaps the most isolated of literary figures, perhaps alongside Camus' Mersault - odd, in that he spends much of his time reading Dickens, his literary antithesis.

A note on story n current New Yorker, Bedtime Story, by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, who has become a NYer regular: Many aspects of this story drew me in and held my interest, as I particularly like stories that have the scope of a novel yet feel right and complete within the scope of short fiction; Bynum's story follows the course of a a love and marriage from high school through first years of parenthood, opening with the husband's "bedtime story" to their child, a retelling of an encounter - maybe didn't actually happen? - from early years of the marriage. Oddly, though, it feels as if Bynum is groping for her own narrative thread; looking back over the story I think that first section could have been cut or trimmed as it proves extraneous to the more dramatic and personal events to follow. Some quibbles: Wouldn't any woman become immediately suspicious when her partner seems to want them to spend time w/ another woman, his "friend" from the gym? Wouldn't any guy be suspicious when his "friend" calls him late at night to say she'd been robbed and to summon him for help? And why is his race relevant to this story? Quibbles aside, though, there are some nice surprises in this piece; it's worth reading to the end.

A whole storm brewing beneath the placid exterior in Out Stealing Horses

I'm about halfway through (re)reading Per Petterson's 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, translated from the Norwegian, and finding it's still an excellent novel, one of the best of the decade - although we've seen little of Petterson since this break-out, who knows why. The narrator, Trond, is a 60-something man who has just bought and moved into a primitive and somewhat neglected small house in rural Norway near the border with Sweden; he's living alone, widowed. In the first chapter he meets one of his few neighbors, Lars, when he steps outside in the night to help L find his stray dog. Trond seems to relish his solitude and his self-reliance. He soon thinks back to a time of his youth - the summer of 1948, when he was 15, and spending the summer w/ his father in a (similar) rustic cabin near a river that crosses from Sweden into Norway (a significant fact that I remember from previous reading but haven't yet reached in the novel this time). Trond and neighbor/friend Jon go "out stealing horses," which isn't stealing but, rather, trespassing into a neighbor's corral and hopping on horses for some bareback riding - dangerous, but they come out OK. After this "horseplay," T watches Jon destroy a bird's nest and its eggs, for no apparent reason. Trond learns from his father that, the day before, Jon was supposed to be watching his 10-year-old twin brothers when, with a gun he'd left unattended, one of the twins, Lars, accidentally shoots and kills his brother. Trond never sees Jon again. But: now back in the present, he recognizes his neighbor as the Lars of his childhood. (In a funny and daring passage, Petterson has his narrator reflect that he wouldn't believe such a coincidence had he read it in a novel!) So at this point in the novel, we have a lot of questions in mind, most notably: What exactly is the narrator running or hiding from? What happened in his youth in 1948 that so traumatized him? What are we to make of the death of his wife in a car accident, which he alludes to quite late in the novel? There are intimations that Trond's father was having an affair w/ Lars's mother, but what will come of that? He and Lars have acknowledged that the recognize each other - "I know who you are," Lars says - but what will come of their recognition? It would only make sense for them to try to "catch up," what happened to Jon?, etc. But in their stoic, Nordic way, they say little to each other. There's lots of mysterious intimations in this novel, and a whole storm building beneath the placid exterior (or interior). Btw, it's hard to imagine anyone but Max von Sydow "playing" lead, if this novel had ever been made into film.

The unexamined questions and issues in Taylor's Summons to Memphis

In the end, Peter Taylor's final novel A Summons to Memphis (1986) is one of those unusual first-person narratives in which we, the readers, are far more knowledgeable than the narrator - not that he's an "unreliable narrator," as his detailed reports about his on-going family crisis are recounted with what seems to be complete veracity, but there's so much the narrator (Phillip Carver) misses. Phillip is in his late 40s, living in Manhattan with his long-term partner, a Jewish woman from Cleveland, and working in publishing and in rare books. He's "summoned" to his home town by his older sisters who want or need his intervention as their 80ish widowed father has announced that he plans to marry. There's actually not "a" summons but several over the course of the novel. The upshot is that the bride-to-be leaves Father at the altar, so to speak, sending him a note via the minister that she's leaving town indefinitely. Over the course of the novel, Phillip goes into great detail about the family history: His father (George) was betrayed by a business partner (Shackelford) in Nashville, so shaming George that he uprooted the family, moved to Memphis, and established anew his legal practice. For Phillip in particular this relocation was traumatic (he was about 13 years old at the time). Other traumas followed, most notably when Phillip falls in love in his 20s and through some intervention of his father the planned marriage was scrapped and the woman's family shipped her off to Brazil. So let's look at what we know and Phillip does not: First, his father was a complete tyrant, ruining the lives of each of his children (none of whom marry). Yet Phillip, encouraged by his partner (Holly) determines to "forget" his father's malicious interventions, though he's unable to "forgive." Well, forget like hell - this is trauma that has paralyzed him for life. (Interestingly, Patrick Conroy wrote about a similar theme at virtually the same time: Southern man through conversations w/ his Jewish therapist soon to be wife comes to terms with his memories of his domineering father.) And there are many unanswered questions, such as: Why has he never met anyone in Holly's family, nor she in his? What could his father possibly have said to get a family to ship their daughter to Brazil in order to avoid marriage to his son? What makes Phillip so sure that his sisters paid a secret visit to the same family in order to try to over-rule the father's dicta? How does the father so readily reconcile with his lifelong enemy? What's behind his father's weird attraction to Phillip's best friend from youth, Alex? How does Phillip never seem to recognize that Alex is living on a shoe string and that his life is entirely different from Phillip's? In short, there are many things that Phillip leaves out of his narration, though we can see the significance of these unanswered questions or un-examined avenues - as he devotes a great deal of his narrative in explaining the subtle (and ultimately pointless) differences between Memphis and Nashville customs. It's a strange novel for sure, but there's much more doing on "behind the scenes" so to speak than on the surface.

A novel behind its rightful time: The excellence of Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis

As I continue during this shut-in to read novels that I remember as being great and that I haven't looked back on for at least 10 years, I've been (re)reading Peter Taylor's (last) novel, A Summons to Memphis. This novel won a Pulitzer fiction prize in 1986 and many other honors and brought deserved attention to Taylor, best known as a writer of short stories, late in his career. Looking back, this novel stands up well over time - but 1986? This novel feels like 1946, or maybe 1846; the pace is slow and elegant and ruminative and very much in the Southern tradition of the first half of the 20th century, a time when Southern writing, all under the shadow of Faulkner and RP Warren, was conservative in style (this goes for Southern poetry as well) and deeply concerned with class and racial distinctions (note that O'Connor and Welty do not fit this "conservative" mode, as least in regard to the conventions of formal style). A Summons moves along like a wide, deep tidal river, moving about in time and slowly building its meandering plot into a whole. This novel is a first-person narration - the narrator being Phillip Carver, a late-40s books editor and rare-book dealer in New York, who receives a surprising call from his older sister telling him that their widowed father is planning to marry a woman in what the sister(s) think will be a disastrous match; he's "called" to their home in Memphis to put things aright. Over the course of this reflective narration, we perceive and gradually come to comprehend that the father, a conservative and respected Memphis lawyer, was a family tyrant who ruined the chances of his 2 daughters and Phillip to find love and happiness in marriage (none ever marries); a 4th sibling died in battle in WWII, with Phillip noting that he was troubled throughout his life. I'm about halfway through the story and so far have no specific information about why the father intervened in the narrator's engagement, secretly and privately, so much so that Phillip's fiancee was shipped off to Brazil and they never saw each other again. What kind of mad man would do this, and what could he have said about the impending marriage to lead to such drastic action. This, we don't yet know. The narrator, in his languid fashion, gives us a lot of information, seemingly extraneous but probably not so, about the differing styles and mores of Memphis and the initial family home in Nashville - a home they abandoned when his father was betrayed in a business deal by a man he thought was his best friend. So there's a lot going on in this short novel - does it at times read like a short story run amok? - but throughout we feel we're in the hands a hugely talented and insightful writer and that the loose ends come together and the plot, in its conventional and formal fashion, will lead to revelation and knowledge, if not love and happiness.

One of the most ambitious debut novels: The God of Small Things

Though the writing style seems a little quaint today, Arundhati Roy's 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, still stands up as one of the best novels in English int he late 20th century and definitely worth a read today. She takes on # of major issues of her time and place - the novel is et in the southernmost state in India, Kerala - most notably the deep-seated class or caste prejudice that has remained intractable in India across generations. It's also a powerful love story, a political tract, an unsettling look at an instance of childhood sexual abuse and its after-effects, and, most touchingly a coming-of-age story shared by twin brother and sister, Estha and Rahel. E and R are at the center of all of the plot elements in the novel, and the essential narrative covers a span of only about two weeks - from the arrival in the small town of the twins' cousin, Sophie, and her (white) mother to Sophie's death by drowning and the horrifying after-effects, notably the mendacious charges against the "untouchable," or Paravan, man - Valutha - who was vital to the operation of the family pickle and preserve business (Paradise Preserves), a friend and mentor to the twins, and the secret lover of their mother, Ammu. Roy holds off the inevitable sex scene till the last chapter, then gives it her all - a smart decision, as by that point we know the tragic consequences of this liaison. Over the course of the novel, which is not told chronologically, we get the back story on most of the family members and thus see the social and psychological forces at work that led to the multiple tragedies. There are some terrifically powerful passages and wonderful descriptions of the dwellings and of the topography, as well as some touches of sly humor amid all the pathos. My quibble, though, is that Roy's style is often - too often - over the top, with lots of word play and puns - in the tradition of Joyce and, I think, Rushdie - examples would be her propensity to break words apart, e.g. Lay Ter, and most of all her predilection for sentence fragments and lists, which makes the style feel jagged and incomplete. Such writing was au courant back in the 90s but feels mannered and out of date today. That aside, the novel is so much more ambitious and copious than most debut fiction and still worth reading.

Strengths and weaknesses of Hadley's current NYer story

I've become a fan of Tessa Hadley's short fiction, though I don't think her piece, The Other One, in the current New Yorker is one of her best. It's a good story, though not great. On the plus side, she, in the wake of Alice Munro, has managed to condense what in other hands would be an entire novel into the shorter scope of a story; also, she's a traditionalist, a believer in plot and character development. Her style is plain and straightforward and insightful, never drawing attention to itself; you look "through" her writing rather than "at" her writing, focusing on the story not the teller. This current story gets off with a bang, so to speak, as we learn in the first sentences that the central character's father died in a car crash when she was 12 and that one of the 2 passengers in the car was his mistress. From that starting point, we follow the woman - now in her late 40s or so, a divorced mother of 2 - as she meets a woman at a dinner party and soon surmises that she was one of the passengers in the car (the other passenger died in the crash). All told, it's a fine set-up for a story, but as the story line progresses we realize that lots, too much, is based on coincidence and improbable behavior. The denouement, for ex., comes about when the woman foolishly heads off w/ her 2 kids to the house of a man she's become interested in - going over on a Sunday morning, unannounced, when he doesn't answer his phone - so of course he's unprepared to see her and bad things will follow, but who would do that? the story also ends, it seems to me, before the inevitable confrontation between the woman and the passenger - though a note in the NYer says that on its website TH will discuss "what happened next" - so either this is a part of a longer piece or at least there will be/is a follow-up story. It needs that - the conclusion leaves too much hanging. Also, note that I don't remember any of the characters' names; there are far too many named characters introduced amidst a cascade of info at the top of the story; the narrative could have been either compressed or opened up into a novel, but as it stands it's difficult to follow, at least for the first few pages. All told, though, it's still a Hadley story and worth the effort to get your bearings at the outset and follow the characters to the at least tentative conclusion.

Why God of Small Things is still a great novel

Continuing to (re)read novels that I at one time thought were great but haven't read in +10 years or so, I'm now about 1/3 of the way through Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997 - [corrected]) and I'm pleased to note that it holds up really well over time: It's as good as or even better than it was at first reading. Roy got lots of attention for this out-of-nowhere novel, her first, released first in India. Her career has been unusual to say the least; following up on this tremendously successful debut she shifted her work toward social/political activism and published a # of nonfiction book in that vein - none of which seemed to catch on with her world-wide readership - and she sort of fell off the literary map. She at lat published a second novel just a few years ago, and the reviews were tepid at best (I didn't read it). I have no idea where she's headed w/ her writing from this point on, but the achievement of God of Small Things is incontrovertible. (It's probably not read much today in part because Roy never built a career as a novelist - at least in part by her choice.) Like a # of the other novels I've been (re)reading, it's a history of a whole society - in this case the Syrian Christian sector of the southernmost Indian state of Kerala - through the vantage of a one family and one family business (a spice and pepper factory) - and we can see how this work is, at least in its theme, similar to, say, Buddenbrooks or Confessions of Zeno. The novel does get off to a rocky start, as Roy introduces many characters right at the top tells her story out of chronological sequence (which was a la mode in the 60s-80s in American and European fiction). But as we get more familiar w/ the characters - particularly in the chapters that involve a long family excursion to both see a movie int he nearest city (Sound of Music!) and then to pick up a cousin arriving for a visit (a visit that we know, from the earliest chapter, will end in her death) we see the themes begin to unfold and then coalesce: The tension between the "upper" caste and the so-called Untouchables, one of whom works in the family pepper factory and is politically active (and I think, if I recall correctly, will have a relationship with one of the daughters/cousins); the relationship between the brother/sister twins and the sexual abuse endured by the brother, Esthal, leading to his muteness and withdrawal from social interaction; the family generational squabbles and thwarted ambitions; the social upheaval in Kerala as the government cracks down on under-class activists. Roy's writing is observant, sometimes funny, often frightening (the abuse scene is terrible sad) - though her excessive use of sentence fragments makes the style sometimes a little too jaunty and stats; writing in complete sentences always makes a novel more "classic" and complete. What would Flaubert (or Proust) do?

Once I thought it was a great novel, but it hasn't held up well over time

As noted previously I've been spending part of this time of shelter in place re-reading novels that I haven't read for +10 years and that, at first reading, I thought were great books. So far so good: Light in August, Suite Francaise, and The Known World all stand up well over the years, as great or even greater than I'd felt about them at first reading. The streak ends here, as Haruki Murakami's early novel A Wild Sheep Chase (1989, a few years later in English tr.) on (re)reading seems like a novel of its time but not really for all time. On the plus side, it's much like a noir detective novel in the Hammett/Spillane/Parker tradition, with the first-person narrator a social isolate, and existential anti-hero (reminding me of Mersault at times), a heavy drinker and smoker, impervious to or oblivious about threats to his life and safety, recently divorced, a habitual loner. These are familiar tropes to American readers, but it was, at least 1990, a novelty to see this type of character in a contemporary Tokyo setting. The Sheep Chase also has a mystical/surreal quality that drives the plot, making it in this way quite different from the noir crime novel. The story line begins as the unnamed narrator - co-owner of a small ad agency/communications shop (not a detective) - comes home to his studio apt. as his wife is walking out on the marriage; shortly thereafter he meets a mysterious young woman (with notably beautiful ears!) and begins a new relationship. He gets a strange call - she warns him it will have to do w sheep (how does she know?) - which ultimately leads to his being summoned by 'the Boss," a reclusive right-wing billionaire and more or less ordered to find in northern Japan the unusual (unique?) sheep that appeared in a stock photo he used in a brochure for a client - and so the chase begins. Years ago this seem quirky and innovative, and I thought it would make a good film (maybe it still would), but coming back to the story these devices seem pretty  much absurd and manipulative and I couldn't help but feel that HM was writing and improvisatory novel, making things up as he moved along - because an author can do that. Part of my disappointment, of course, comes from reading many subsequent HM novels and stories, so what seemed fresh in Sheep Chase - his first in English I'm pretty sure - now seems familiar and even mannered. All that said, for a reader in the right frame of mind, interested in a surreal send-up of the noir crime novel, Sheep Chase can be fun - and it brought HM to an international readership - but it doesn't hold up as a great novel of its time.

Why The Known World is a great novel

It's hard to overstate the significance and the excellence of Edward P. Jones's novel, The Known World (2003), which won a Pulitzer Prize plus other awards on its publication but at this point who's reading it? I honestly would put this novel among the great novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries; EPJ has written one of the rare encyclopedic novels that give a depiction of an historical era in a defined locale told through the life experiences of many characters whose fortunes life, die, and criss-cross. The closest analog would probably be A Hundred Years of Solitude and maybe - though this one focuses more on a single protagonist, The Leopard. Faulkner comparisons are also inevitable, particularly them mid-career "difficult" novels with multiple intersection plot lines, e.g. Light in August and Absalom!, Absalom!, as both are novels of the deeply segregated South, though obviously seen from differing vantages. The Known World establishes a fictional rural Virginia county (Manchester) ca 1840, and EPJ is particularly focused on the moral dilemmas and quandaries as well as the great pain and sorrow that confronted and overwhelmed so many people in that era, with reverberations down to our day. Among the many issues and conditions and raises and examines: A freed black man who runs his own plantation based on slave labor (to the furious anger of his father, a lifelong abolitionist) under the tutelage of the wealthiest and often brutally racist white plantation owners; a sheriff obligated to set up patrols to capture runaway slaves, which the law treats as property not as human beings; the internal politics on the plantation that often pit black against black depending on stature (house slaves v field slave, e.g.). This novel works so well because EPJ never descends to polemics or tendentious writing; he presents the many plot lines unadorned, and the readers must draw our own conclusions and observations. And the builds the novel on a series of dramatic, almost cinematic actions that converge at the end with some startling developments; EPJ also is able to step in and out of his own narration, often hitting a pause button and jumping decades ahead to fill us in on the fate of some of the central (or peripheral) characters. I think there are two reasons why The Known World is not as well-known as it should be: First, EPJ does nothing to make this novel easy for readers. Many characters and plot lines are introduced right at the start, w/ more to come, so it's exceptionally hard to keep characters straight; I would suggest taking extensive marginal notes (which I did) or perhaps finding - it must exist online - a plot and character summary. Second, EPJ hasn't published much - some very good stories but no other novel to date - over the 17 years since this debut novel. Productivity isn't everything - The Leopard was Lampdusa's only work, for ex. - but the lack of publication has kept EPJ out of the spotlight (or microscope) and has unfairly pushed EPJ and his great novel onto the sidelines.

George Saunders's must-read story in the current New Yorker

I've long been an admirer of George Saunders's short stories; his story in the current New Yorker, Love Letter, is a must-read, and differs somewhat from the typical GS story of the past. He's best known for his imaginative, often funny, often scary stories from sometime the indefinite future, into an era in which social norms are warped and frightfully credible extensions and exaggerations of our current social norms: For example, from my memory, a story about living human beings as part of the exhibits or dioramas in a natural history or a historical museum/theme part (Civilwarland, et al.); or, a world in which the wealthy buy groups of third-world women to exhibit as part of their lawn-displays (Semplica Girls). The current story is also a message from the future, a letter from a 70ish man to his grandson - but it's so close to our present reality as to be even more scary than his more fantastical stories. He writes from a time when the US is (even more) of a police state, and it's terrifying how close it feels to reality - you don't need a weatherman to make sense of this story and to see it as prophetic rather than dystopian. That said, it's still written in GS's witty, playful style - so it's by no means a screed, a rant, or a Cassandra-cry. Rather, it's both touching and dire, a story very much of this moment; sadly, one of his best.

The challlenges and the greatness of Edward P. Jones's The Known World

As noted previously, during this period of voluntary quarantine I've turned to my own library for sustenance and am focusing on novels that I first read more than 10 years ago that, at the time, I thought were great works of art. So far, so good - Light in August and Suite Francaise both lived up to maybe even exceeded my expectations and recollections. A have started now (re)reading Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), a novel I loved on first reading and about which I was far from alone; the book won a # of national awards including a Pulitzer Prize (and Jones has published since then a new excellent short stories but mot much else, as he's strangely faded into near-obscurity - from all accounts he seems to be a brilliant and eccentric writer, who, I've read, has his stories fully committed to memory before writing them down in any manner!). At first going on The Known World I thought: Is there something wrong w/ me? Or with this novel? The novel is in the mode of and probably influenced by Garcia Marquez, with many characters quickly introduced and many plot lines, set in the past, portrait of an entire community, moving around quite freely in time - in short, extremely difficult to follow over the first 50 pp of so. But I had faith and stayed the course, so to speak, and The Known World comes gradually into focus (it helps that I have been vigilant in writing marginalia and even brief plot summaries of each of the sections - would be harder to read  this novel if it were from a library) and at this point, about 150 pp (33%or so) into the novel, I can see its grandeur and originality: Essentially, it's the story of a black ma, Henry Townsend, born into slavery, his freedom purchased by his father (Augustus) from his "master," Robbins; Henry is smart and industrious and begins to build his own small Va. plantation - this is ca 1840, pre-Civil War - and eventually purchases slaves on his own, infuriating his father; Henry works and lives under the protection of Robbins - a cruel and nasty man to many, but who has a particular fatherly liking for Henry. The first chapter tells of Henry's death - at a pretty young age, maybe his 30s? - and its effect on the plantation and on his surviving parents and wife, Caldonia. Over the course of this narrative we learn about a world that is not really the "known" but more like the un-known: It's still not clear to me if there actually were black slave owners in Virginia (I'm pretty sure that, if there were, that would have ended by the Civil War era); we see a whole community in all of its diversity and eccentricity, and in a world of hurt and sorrow; perhaps no other novel since Beloved has given as stark and outrageous depiction of the tolerated and state-supported racism under which so many tragically lived, worked (slaved), and died.