Review by New York Times Review
WHEN READERS FIRST meet Eddie, one of the principal characters in James Hannaham's much anticipated second novel, he is struggling to steer a stolen vehicle out of Louisiana and north up Interstate 45, to where he's told his aunt and longtime protector now lives, in St. Cloud, Minn., a place whose very name sounds to him like heaven after the hell he has just endured. Eddie has no hands. How exactly he came to have them severed, a final act of desperation in a novel singularly focused on desperate acts, isn't revealed until the end. But one thing becomes brutally apparent from the start: Eddie's mother, Darlene, is overtaken by drug addiction born out of grief over the early, violent death of Eddie's black activist father, Nat - and her clouded judgment leads to any number of miseries for herself and her son. When she is tempted in her stupor into a van and into a contract with a company called Delicious Foods, which also gives the novel its title, she is secreted away to a camp where she is forced to work, in order to pay off the debt of her room and food and the diet of crack cocaine overseers use to keep their slave laborers subdued. The drug so utterly annihilates Darlene's autonomy that it speaks for her, narrating her portions of the novel as "Scotty" - a sinister, wiseass monologuist who often sounds like a cross between Katt Williams and the Devil himself. In short, Hannaham is never lacking in ambition - and he means to tell a sweeping American tale that draws equally from "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" and "The Grapes of Wrath." Unlike those classics of captivity and exploitation, however, Hannaham actively resists allowing his characters to stand in as exemplars whose stories unearth a larger system rigged against the innocent. Instead, Darlene and Nat are accidental iconoclasts, whose small-bore rebellions are often the result of naïve idealism (as when Nat decides they should move to Ovis, La., in order to become civil rights activists, because the "name sounded humble to him, like the sort of place where he could organize and mobilize small-town black folks"). That their rash decisions often guide them into dangerous terrain is part of Hannaham's mission, allowing him to explore the thorny nexus of systemic racism and the personal destruction that often hounds the hopeless. The voice of Scotty, the drug working on Darlene's brain, is never less than seductive, assuring her no one loves her the way he does. But it's important to note that the depraved exploitation at the center of "Delicious Foods" is based on real events. Hannaham (whose first novel was the well-received "God Says No") has said he drew inspiration from the particular case of Bulls-Hit, a farm in Hastings, Fla., south of St. Augustine, in which overseers are said to have plied black workers with crack and alcohol, exactly as the book describes. But even Hannaham acknowledges the case was unusual. A vast majority of recent instances of what could be called modern slavery, especially in the American food industry, have involved Hispanic workers - and have almost all been in Florida, not Louisiana, where the book is set. (One such case, in Immokalee, is harrowingly depicted in the recent documentary "Food Chains.") Thus the abuse and manipulation as depicted serve more to comment on the long history of slave labor on Southern plantations and the equally inescapable trap of indentured servitude under Jim Crow than the realities of field work in the food industry. Nevertheless, Hannaham's decision to focus on African-American characters seems to give him the freedom to fully inhabit the voice of Scotty while also achingly describing the early-life struggles that Eddie faces as the child of a dead father and drug-addicted mom. Early in the novel, for example, Darlene tells her son that his Vietnam-veteran father, who peers out from a fading photograph in his Air Force uniform, was killed by Southern racists, not the Viet Cong. "Charlie didn't get your daddy, no sir. He had to come home to Jim Crow for that." The turn of phrase is striking - but it gains its deeper resonance in the way that Eddie comes to associate black birds with death. At one point, Eddie remembers scattering grackles from behind his house when he was still a boy. "In his fantasy," Hannaham writes, "Eddie knew that if he could only clear all the birds from the backyard, his father would return - not the stiff, fading image, but the real, lanky man whose crossed leg he would ride like a horse into that unhad future." Much later, when Eddie finally finds his mother, long after her kidnapping, he chances upon her chasing a grackle. She is so focused on catching the bird that she cannot snap out of her trance, even after her half-forgotten son wraps her in his arms. "Eddie clung to her waist and bellowed, Ma," Hannaham writes, "while she screeched and howled in the direction of the grackle, which leapt into even higher branches, then took flight above the tree-tops and into the smudgy sky, its black wings flapping quickly, then slowly, then fading into nothing." Such moments of deft lyricism are Hannaham's greatest strength, and those touches of beauty and intuitive metaphor make the novel's difficult subject matter much easier to bear. "Delicious Foods," however, is more often messy and scattershot when it comes to more basic issues of pacing, structure and, sometimes, simple narrative detail. When we finally witness the scene in which Eddie's hands are severed, for example, Hannaham can't seem to decide whether to play it for dark comedy or gothic horror - and the uncertainty makes what should be the book's most gripping scene into something that is painstakingly described yet nearly impossible to picture. In the end, the novel's finest moments are not in its grander ambitions, but rather in the singular way that Hannaham can make the commonplace spring to life with nothing more than astute observation and precise language. This poses a fascinating quandary for Hannaham as a writer with many novels yet ahead of him. Does he work to hone his skills as a social realist and commentator on larger issues of contemporary concern by better mapping out their connections to history? Or does he tighten his focus into the lives of people whose circumstances may be less obviously dramatic but whose worlds become large by way of Hannaham's considerable gifts? Either path promises to make Hannaham a writer of major importance, and "Delicious Foods" is a notable and engaging step along that road. But I, for one, hope that Hannaham will not rest on the laurels that are almost certainly coming his way. If he can resist that temptation, his next book, whatever it turns out to be, will be not only eagerly anticipated but also long remembered. Hannaham traces the nexus of racism and self-destruction that often hounds the hopeless. TED GENOWAYS is the author of "The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food," a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Award.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 5, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* If The Great Gatsby was the Great American Novel of the twentieth century, Delicious Foods could be that of the early twenty-first. The hero is not a rich white man but a poor black kid in the South, Eddie, whose young life unravels when his activist father is murdered. Eddie's mom, Darlene, falls apart, each year bringing her closer to the streets, where eventually she is lured into a van to go work at Delicious Foods. The recruiters describe a rural farm with three-star accommodations, fair wages, and an open supply of crack cocaine, but only one of those promises proves to be true. Darlene and Eddie spend the next years sleeping on rusty bunk beds and working seven days a week for wages that are immediately eaten up by the company store and demerits doled out by their armed guards. When the owners of Delicious Foods are finally brought to justice, Darlene is faced with the painful choices of freedom: how to break free of her pain-erasing addiction, how to live without promises, how to feed her body and soul with truly good food that strengthens rather than kills. If the plot sounds like tough going, Hannaham's masterpiece is anything but. The writing makes it great, and the themes of pain, forgiveness, exploitation, and self-creation make it American. It is simply unmissable.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hannaham proves to be just as savvy a voice narrator as he is an author, bringing the story to life in the audio edition of his latest literary tome. His performance is a memorable one. It's roughly divided between two distinct voices: an elegant, deep tone Hannaham employs for straight narration, and the fast-talking, hilarious, street-infused inflections of Scotty, the personified voice of crack cocaine. Hannaham clearly has fun with Scotty, so much that listeners will begin to feel the seductive pull of the drug and the intimate, exclusive relationship it promises. Along the way Hannaham shows off a warm, graceful singing voice when he briefly portrays a musician turned wino. He gives depth to his main characters, including the resourceful tween Eddie and his mother, Darlene, whose downfall over the course of the novel takes her from a life as a respectable college graduate to a crack-addicted slave on a modern plantation. A first-class performance of a darkly satirical novel. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A modern-day story of exploitation and slavery in the drug trade, this novel features three main characters: Darlene, a college-educated African American mother who descends into addiction when her activist husband is killed; Eddie, her devoted son; and Scotty, the malevolent and self-centered voice of the drug. Hannaham (God Says No) narrates this recording with a crisp and no-nonsense voicing until he reaches Scotty's portion of the story. Then, the metamorphosis is total as Hannaham imbues the voice of the drug with all the sass and verve of a forbidden and powerful enticement, one that is an "old friend" to Darlene. This audiobook is worth a listen just for Scotty's character, but listeners will stick with the novel through the horrendous developments because Hannaham wisely starts off this work with the ending, the survival of Eddie. VERDICT Recommended for most public and university library collections. ["Hannaham doesn't flinch as he draws attention to exploitation and racial injustice through memorable characters undaunted by their own personal suffering, wisecracking their country wisdom about survival and loyalty to family and friends. An eye-opening, standout novel": LJ Xpress Reviews 3/6/15 starred review of the Little, Brown hc.]-Karen Perry, Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, VA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Southern farm provides the backdrop for a modern-day slavery tale in this textured, inventive and provocatively funny novel.The second novel by Hannaham (Creative Writing/Pratt Institute; God Says No, 2009) opens with a harrowing prologue: Eddie, a black 17-year-old, is manically driving a truck from a Louisiana plantation that he's escaped. His hands have been cut off for reasons not explained till the end of the novel, and he's desperate to get to Minnesota. The story then snaps back to six years earlier, as Eddie's mother, Darlene, descends into crack addiction after the murder of her husband, a shop owner and community organizer who fell afoul of local bigots. While working as a prostitute, she and other addicts and indigents are corralled by a woman into a van and coerced to sign a contract that effectively makes them the property of Delicious Foods, a produce farm that plies its workers with drugs and alcohol to extract cheap, unquestioning labor. What's so funny about any of that? Partly Hannaham's daring approach to style and point of view: Much of the novel is narrated by the crack Darlene is addicted to. Nicknamed Scotty, the drug first shows up as a few rocks in her purse as she works the streets and throughout has a voice like the devil on your shoulder. ("I rushed into the few doubting and unbelieving parts left in Darlene's mind and I shouted, Babygirl, surrender to yes! Say yes to good feelings!") The plot turns on Darlene's struggles at Delicious Foods and Eddie's efforts to find her, and in the process, Hannaham finds room to comment on and satirize a variety of racial (and racist) iconographies, from watermelons to David Duke to voodoo to the sexual demands of plantation owners. In that context, the fate of Eddie's hands becomes a potent allegory for centuries of black men and women stripped of the power to control their destinies. A poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
