Review by New York Times Review
there's A moment, early in Laird Hunt's new novel, "The Evening Road," when one of the narrators pauses to contemplate the journey before her. Ottie Lee is a white woman on her way to a lynching in Marvel, Ind., in 1930. She's seen racial violence before - a black man who was "selling bad tonic," she says, got "beaten around the block" - but a lynching is "something else entirely." Yet rather than reflecting on the horror, Ottie Lee considers how the lynching might affect her own life. A friend has told her there is "something special on its way for you, something you can't miss, something that will make it all come clear," and Ottie Lee wonders if the lynching is that "special thing." In anticipation of great violence, Ottie Lee's mind skips over atrocities and comes back to herself, to what's in it for her, and also to a cool assessment of her own worth: the "soft backs" of her hands and her "long red locks" as well as her poverty, her "legs in their not-so-nice stockings." Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of the James Baldwin quote: "If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent . . . 'the Negro problem.'" In Ottie Lee, Hunt has created a sly comment on the narrative of lynching in American history. As the historian Dora Apel has detailed, such attacks were closely tied to the myth of white women's (and only white women's) sexual purity. The "cult of true womanhood," begun in the 19 th century and continually evoked in the 20 th as justification for lynching, insisted on the moral superiority and sexual purity of white women, which were allegedly under constant threat by black men who needed to be tortured as punishment and revenge. Yet far from morally pure, Ottie Lee is compromised from the start - the very first scene finds her sharpening pencils and threatening to kill her boss, Bud, with them, a threat we soon learn is part of a lazy sexual game between the two, which Ottie Lee's husband is beginning to discern. Ottie Lee is poor. Her husband, Dale, has spent most of their money on a pig for their homestead, and she works at Bud's insurance office and tolerates his passes for a few extra dollars in their account. Ottie Lee carries the childhood shame and anger of being abandoned to a care home by her alcoholic salesman of a father and her incarcerated mother. And she is keenly aware of the sexual economy she inhabits; she is valuable to Bud and to other men only as a sexual object. (Hunt is unflinching in outlining how the anticipation of racial violence carries a sexual charge for white men in the novel: "Bud was excited, what with the lynching to get to and all, so he went straight from putting his hand on my leg to making his try on me.") Ottie Lee, then, is not the pure white maiden central to the narratives of lynching in American culture - she is seedier, sweatier. She's also, initially, a rebuke of the innocent white female savior at the center of so many present-day dramas and melodramas about race (think of Skeeter, the white heroine of "The Help," or Lily Owens, the white protagonist in "The Secret Life of Bees"). In these moments, I appreciated the thorny work on the page. Ottie Lee is an uncomfortable exploration of the bystander: the kind of young woman so often seen in those horrific lynching postcards, turning to the camera and grinning. Through her we see the interior life of a person who could pose like that and the type of environment that could produce that picture. With such a promising start, then, it's disappointing when the novel begins to falter. Ottie Lee, Bud and the others don't use the words "black," "colored," "Negro" or the usual racial slurs to describe the men who are to be lynched. Instead, they use the word "cornflowers." Hunt has said he chose the term from a paint catalog to evoke Indiana while replacing the "ugliest epithets" he found "almost unbearable." But the effect reads only as coy, an attempt to prettify the violence. At one point, Ottie Lee, Bud and Dale are led to a prayer vigil for the victims of the lynching, and Ottie Lee, looking across the church, notes it is "filled to its fat gizzards with cornsilk and cornflower folks both. Maybe even some cornroots . . . and corntassels too. All of them sitting next to each other like they was one great big shook salad in one great big salad bowl." As powerful as the vigil "against the hangings" should be, its impact is lost because of the euphemism. Even stranger than the language, and harder to swallow, is the presence of the white characters at this church in the first place. They have been led there by a childhood friend of Ottie Lee's named Sally (who is "part cornroot through her father"), but none of the black parishioners seem to notice the intrusion or to fear the outsiders. Indeed, Sally mentions offhand that she's going to lend her truck to some boys who want to drive others to the vigil. The novel would have us believe that a woman joined by unsympathetic whites at an anti-lynching vigil in 1930s Indiana would offer her truck to young black men - and that the men would still trust her and accept the offer, under the threat of a lynching happening nearby. This seems unbelievable even as Hunt gives Sally the knowing line that the vigil is "a wonderful surprise, for it was the future sitting there bowing its head." In such moments, it seems possible that Hunt intended to write a sort of reconciliation fantasy. But fantasy not grounded in actual social dynamics and the facts of life is merely escape. In another early scene, a young "cornflower" on a bicycle goes out of his way to challenge Bud, and looks Ottie Lee in the eye without repercussions. Rather than subverting standard racial narratives, scenes like this lead to incredulity and the sense that the characters are little more than game pieces. Halfway through the book, Hunt introduces a second narrator: a black woman named Calla, also caught up in the lynching at Marvel. Calla sometimes has beautiful language to describe the same world that Ottie Lee is moving through. Here are her opening lines: "I stepped up slow from the river, like it was me not the good green water that had decided to follow its lazy ways." But, again, Calla's take on her world can assume a decidedly modern cast. She dismisses her aunt and uncle's concerns about safety: "It's not like they're going to lynch us all." That claim simply wasn't a sure bet in 1930, when for years before and after, whole towns of black people were razed by white mobs and multiple lynchings continued. These missteps are regrettable. In exploring the mind-set and complicity of the bystander and the connection between white women and black women in a racist, patriarchal culture, Hunt has addressed some especially timely issues. But as I delved deeper into the psyches of Ottie Lee and Calla, I thought of Audre Lorde's assessment of the limits of solidarity between white women and women of color: "Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying." This fundamental, painful divide is edged toward, hinted at, but never fully allowed to break open in this novel. ? A heroine like the young women in lynching postcards, grinning at the camera. KAITLYN greenidge is the author of a novel, "We Love You, Charlie Freeman."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
A rural town in Indiana in the 1920s has had more than its share of racial tensions. It is a cauldron of racist excesses and mounting resentments and resistance. One sultry evening, the town is stirred up by the prospects of a lynching in nearby Marvel, and residents get to the roads, some rushing to the event, others rushing away, all of them caught in dramas large and small. Ottie Lee Henshaw is a woman in her thirties of good looks and a smart mouth, managing an uninspiring husband and a lecherous boss. Their travel to the lynching is a comedy of errors and mishaps as they cross paths with fortune-tellers and moonshiners. Sixteen-year-old Calla Destry, orphaned and living with a local family, is also on the evening road, focused on meeting a lover and the promise of a different future. She too crosses paths with an assortment of characters in what one calls a big night full of mysteries. Critically acclaimed Hunt (Neverhome, 2014) offers fascinating characters and the subtlest of life-changing moments.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At once dreamily timeless and fitting for the current national moment, Hunt's (Neverhome) hypnotic latest takes place on one evening in August 1920, when two equally strong-and scarred-women cross paths in Indiana. Ottie Lee Henshaw is at work when her boss reports that townspeople in nearby Marvel are planning to lynch several black youths accused of crimes against whites. Elated, he gathers Ottie Lee and her husband, Dale, and the three (all of whom are white) set off for the "rope party." Their trip is constantly interrupted-by the lure of a catfish supper, a car accident that leaves them walking, and a chance ride that delivers them to a Quaker prayer vigil instead of the lynching-as Ottie Lee's vibrant facade slowly cracks to reveal her deep fears. Meanwhile, black teenager Calla Destry goes to the river near Marvel to meet her ambitious white lover who calls himself Leander. When he doesn't show, she takes her foster father's car and rides off to escape Marvel's angry mob and find Leander for an urgent conversation. As her mind shifts between past and present, real and imaginary, Calla's journey reveals the secrets she hides. Though the novel's meandering odysseys sometimes feel frustrating, Hunt's striking prose and visionary imagery capture America's community bonds, violent prejudices, falling darkness, and searing light. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Imagine you're all fired up about going from your small Indiana town in summer 1920 to witness a lynching in the nearby town of Marvel. There's plenty of liquor on hand, and everyone you meet on the way is as excited as you are about this upcoming spectacle. Hunt (Neverhome) relates here the attempt of Ottie Lee Henshaw; her husband, Dale; and her lecherous boss Bud to make their way to the lynching. Bud's car breaks down early on, and the hapless trio are forced to rely on passersby to get them to their destination. Not everyone is going to the lynching, however. In a parallel story, teenage Calla Destry, a resourceful African American who has been orphaned and is trying to escape from Marvel to start a new life. William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying-with its mix of the tragic and the comic-comes to mind as one follows Hunt's characters on the paths he's laid out for them. Verdict A strength of this novel is that Hunt doesn't moralize but leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. Another plus is his vivid, pungent prose and racy dialog. Advisory: it gets pretty raw. Well recommended where fine writing is prized.-Edward Cone, New York © Copyright 2017. 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
In 1920 Indiana, a threatened lynching becomes a magnet for two women navigating different physical and emotional paths in this engrossing work."You are speaking in originalities," says the heroine of Hunt's previous novel (Neverhome, 2014, etc.). The line applies as well to the book's well-crafted writing, rich plot, and doughty lead, a woman disguised as a man in the Union Army during the Civil War. Hunt's new book raises his own high bar further with an almost fablelike view of prejudice and cruelty some 60 years after emancipation. He calls whites cornsilks and blacks cornflowers, so the lynching stems from this allegation: "Some cornflowers shot a cornsilk and set a hundred houses on fire." The cornsilks head for the town of Marvel expecting to enjoy a "rope party." One group's adventures along the way are narrated by Ottie Lee Henshaw, secretary to a businessman and wife to Dale, owner of a massive pig. They get a flat tire, commandeer a mule-drawn wagon, visit a church supper and a prayer meeting, and find out more about themselves than they expected. The book's second big section is narrated by Calla Destry, a tough teenage cornflower orphan who has been taken in by a local black couple and then, in other ways, by a smooth-talking cornsilk. That's the man Calla sets out to find because she's in trouble. Her meanderings occupy roughly the same time frame as the first half, while her different route intersects the others' in intriguing ways. The split-screen view highlights and breaches the racial divide. The lynching remains mostly offstage. Hunt finds history or the big events useful framing devices, but he is more interested in how words can do justice to single players and life's fraught moments. Hunt brings to mind Flannery O'Connor's grotesques and Barry Hannah's bracingly inventive prose and cranks. He is strange, challenging, and a joy to read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
