Review by New York Times Review
NEAR the end of his vast new historical novel, "A Moment in the Sun," John Sayles describes a street performer who "built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin." Spectators bet against "the master architect" and his precarious creation, but he keeps adding tiles and winning wagers. This performer is, of course, a stand-in for Sayles himself, who has also built an elaborate house of tiles and managed, against all odds, to keep it standing. The book opens in 1897, the year of the Klondike gold rush, and closes in 1903, the year after the Philippine-American War ended, and in between it takes the measure of America on the brink of the 20th century. "A Moment in the Sun" is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers' presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment canceled for some by the e-book) by offering reliable entertainment: with its impersonations of political figures, fraught romances and life-threatening adventures, the book is akin to the "Variety Arts" show one character attends. Variety is further served by alternating the narrative among four culturally diverse perspectives. The Western rover Hod Brackenridge, a former farmer and fired miner, goes to the Yukon, gets cheated out of his stake, becomes a boxer in fixed fights and, on the run from the law, enlists in the Army in Colorado. Tutored by an African-American and then a Native American, goodhearted Hod is an adult Huck Finn in the territory, and a consistently pleasurable presence. Hod's superior officer, Niles Manigault, is another rambler and a gambler, the ne'er-do-well son of a judge in Wilmington, N.C., where Niles's intellectual brother, Harry, is at odds with their Confederate veteran father. In the later stages of the book, the war-profiteering Niles becomes a politician while Harry moves to New York and finds his vocation making movies. Wilmington is also home to the third group of characters - the African-American Dr. Lunceford; his teenage daughter, Jessie; his son, Junior, an aspiring "New Negro"; and Junior's friend Royal Scott, who loves without hope the higher-class Jessie. Inspired by newspaper propaganda ("REMEMBER THE MAINE!"), Junior and Royal enlist to fight the Spanish in Cuba. Not long after they return home in 1898, race riots break out in Wilmington, where prominent whites like Niles's father deprived blacks of their voting rights and legal residences. As the novel progresses, Hod, Niles, Junior and Royal ship out to battle in the Philippines - a military intervention, in Sayles's presentation, as legally dubious as the one in Cuba and as racist as the riots in Wilmington. In the Pacific, Sayles introduces his fourth set of characters: the Jesuit-educated and Manila-refined Diosdado Concepcíon and the peasant farmer Bayani Pandoc, who rebel against the Spanish, fight a series of losing battles against the American occupiers and cross paths with Niles and Royal. Sayles combines these narratives skillfully so they refresh the reader's curiosity, have plausible literal intersections and build to a comprehensive representation of American political violence at home and abroad. The novel's many crowd scenes provide frequent dramatic intensity. Sayles begins with Yukon prospectors rushing with greed and fight fans lusting for blood, segues to mass assaults in Cuba and mob violence in Wilmington, then moves on to villages of victims in the Philippines. The director of 17 movies, including "Amigo" (set in the Philippines and scheduled for release later this year), and the author of three other novels including "Union Dues," Sayles knows how to balance his cinematic crowds with novelistic inwardness. Yet "A Moment in the Sun" remains, like that stack of tiles, precarious and risky in its joining of different fictional styles. The book mentions both Harriet Beecher Stowe and, in a winking reference, a bicycle racer named Pynchon (Sayles once called "Gravity's Rainbow" the "best 'big' book I know"). In its scale, multiple plots, rigorous attention to setting and technology, colloquial exactitude, race consciousness and suspicion of political power, "A Moment in the Sun" is admirably Pynchonian. But Sayles sometimes flirts with Stowe's sentimentality - particularly when some of the African-Americans move to New York City and new female characters are introduced. Women are brought low by poverty, and men have a soft spot for prostitutes and widows. Children are ragged and sick. Although I prefer the Pynchonian elements, I admit I had moist eyes at several points; Sayles is a master of both architecture and affect. He is also a master of the set piece, the local story that eventually and surprisingly fits into the bigger narrative. His method is usually oblique, piquing the reader's interest with an initially odd perspective. After President McKinley's assassination is briefly described through the eyes of the assassin, for instance, the next chapter begins, "They all want to be put wise and expect Shoe to come up with the dope." Shoe has not appeared before; he enters the novel as an inmate in the prison where the assassin is ultimately electrocuted. Like many of the book's characters, high and low, he is guilty of fraud - in his case, a fixed horse race that recalls fixed fights in the boxing ring and in foreign theaters of war where bully Uncle Sam carries a big stick. In writing about the turn of the 20th century, Sayles keeps one eye fixed on technology. Shoe and the other prisoners think of their improvised chain of communication as a telegraph; yellow journalists assert that the Maine was blown up by an "infernal machine"; Diosdado watches an execution by "the screw." The rioters in Wilmington display a Gatling gun. Other machines, including the linotype and the movie camera, may also have "infernal" effects, but nothing like the prison's electric chair. The novel closes with a crowd watching the electrocution of an elephant at Coney Island - an ironic comment on the superior technology that defeated Spain and on violence as mass entertainment. NOT every episode is equally rich. Several brief chapters supply canned background through a generic Hearst cartoonist, and others offer pedagogical cameos by such figures as the anti-imperialist Mark Twain and Leon Czolgosz, McKinley's assassin. Nor are the major characters equally engaging. Although Sayles's sympathies are clearly with the Filipino people, and he spends considerable energy on local color and the islands' cultures, Diosdado remains essentially an idealistic aristocrat and Bayani a canny peasant. When Sayles introduces a rogue Chinese woman sold into prostitution in the Philippines, where she eventually marries a central character, some readers may feel this is one tile too many, but no single episode or aesthetic overreach can shake the well-founded monument of "A Moment in the Sun." This novel will probably be praised as a distant mirror of contemporary history, of Vietnam and Iraq, and it is that. But its true importance lies not in its rearview relevance but in its commitment to recalling in heroic detail a little-known and contradictory historical moment, a sunny time of American pride but also of hubris in sun-beaten locales: North Carolina, Cuba, the Philippines. Ultimately, Sayles differs from both Stowe, who wanted her melodrama to change reality, and Pynchon, who mixes his wacky inventions with his encyclopedic knowledge. More than once, Sayles describes performers as "channels." He also satirizes a newspaper editor who says, "We mustn't let mere facts stand in the way of larger truths." Sayles is not a neutral channel, but in his respect for facts both documented and extrapolated, he is devoted to offering us a new understanding of the past. In winking references, Sayles acknowledges debts to both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Pynchon. Tom LeClair is the author of "The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 12, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In his most spectacular work of fiction to date, filmmaker Sayles combines wonder and outrage in a vigorous dramatization of overlooked and downright shameful aspects of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America. Fascinated by the roiling nation's multicultural spectrum and human impulses corrupt and altruistic, Sayles re-creates the ferment and conflicts of the Yukon gold rush, hobo life, New York's sweatshops, the race riot and white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the covered-up horrors of the Philippine-American War (the focus of Sayles's forthcoming film, Amigo). Real-life figures appear, including President McKinley and his assassin and anti-imperialist Mark Twain, but it is Sayles' vital invented characters who rule, from sweet, hapless Hod, who survives the brutality of mines, the boxing ring, jail, and the military without losing his faith in romance, to his wry Native American road buddy, Big Ten; the Luncefords, a cultured African American family that suffers an appalling reversal of fortune; Mei, a Chinese woman forced into prostitution; and Diosdado, a young Filipino rebel. Crackling with rare historical details, spiked with caustic humor, and fueled by incandescent wrath over racism, sexism, and serial injustice against working people, Sayles' hard-driving yet penetrating and compassionate saga explicates th. fever drea. of commerce, the crimes of war, and the dream of redemption.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Though known best as a filmmaker (Eight Men Out), Sayles is also an accomplished novelist (Union Dues), whose latest will stand among the finest work on his impressive resume. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, the behemoth recalls E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Pynchon's Against the Day, and Dos Passos's USA trilogy, tracking mostly unconnected characters whose collective stories create a vast, kaleidoscopic panorama of the turn of the last century. Hod Brackenridge is a miner who gets swindled in the Alaskan gold rush, is strong-armed into a boxing match, and ends up on the run after his opponent dies in the ring. Diosdado, son of a Spanish diplomat, turns against his country and the United States to fight for independence in the Philippines. The most emotionally connected story line involves the black American soldiers who breeze through fighting in Cuba but get stuck in a quagmire in the Philippines while their families back home in Wilmington, N.C., endure a campaign of murder and intimidation that forces an affluent and educated black family out of their home and into poverty in New York City. Naturally, there are cameos-Mark Twain, president McKinley-and period details aplenty that help alleviate the occasional slow patches-indeed, Hod's story line loses steam toward the end-but the flaws and muck of this big, rangy novel are part of what make it so wonderful. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Noted novelist/director Sayles (Union Dues, 2005, etc.) turns in an epic of Manifest Destinyand crossed destiniesso sweeping and vast that even he would have trouble filming it.The year is 1897. As Sayle's cat-squasher of a book opens, a greenhorn arrival at the Alaska gold fields meets a man named Joe Raven, who "is something called a Tlingit and there is no bargaining with him." As so often happens in Sayles's filmic narratives, the native man possesses wisdom that is crucial for survivalbut, alas, too few of the Anglo newcomers, sure of the superiority of American civilization, are willing to admit his usefulness. Hod, the newcomer, is assured that American civilization will come through for him: remarks a fellow miner, "Got a steady man in the White House who understands there are fortunes to be made if the government will just step out of the way and let usatem."Holy shades of Ron Paul, Batman. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, a young Filipino, Diosdado Concepcin, is preparing himself for battle against the colonizers of his island; he is brash enough that a fellow fighter is moved to caution, "I am a patriot...but not a suicide." Farther away still are two African-American soldiers, Royal Scott and Junior Lunceford, who are discovering just how racist the America of the turn of the century can be. Sayles pulls all these characters onto a huge global stage, setting them into motion as America goes to war against Spain and takes its first giant step toward becoming a world power. The narrative is full of historical lessons of the Howard Zinn/Studs Terkel radical-revisionist school, but Sayles is too good a writer to be a propagandist; his stories tell their own lessons, and many will be surprises (who knew that there were lynchings in Brooklyn as well as the Deep South?).A long time in coming, with an ending that's one of the most memorable in recent literature. A superb novel, as grand in its vision as one of President McKinley's dreamsbut not for a moment, as Sayles writes of that figure, "empty of thought, of emotion."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
