Tagged with historical novels

Thank goodness this was a compelling read because I had only a few days to finish it before it was due back at NYPL. I came home from the Zine Librarians unConference to five books ready to be picked up, three of them two-week loans. Now I have just over a week to finish the other two. Never mind, they were both renewable. Phew!

So yeah, Orphan Train shares parallel stories of two quasi-orphans making their way through harsh adoption/foster conditions about eighty years apart. The elder, an Irish immigrant at a time when the Irish were viewed with open hostility in the US, is taken to the Midwest via orphan train in the 1920s after a fire claims her family. In the name of Christian goodness, children were given away, often to be used as servants. Flash forward to the early 21st century and you get foster parents paid to "care" for a child they seem to hate.

I've read the book's prequel Rivington Street but hadn't revisited Union Square since I bought it in a used bookstore in Guatemala in 2001. RS is a historical novel, but US reads more like a fictional history. It's full of educational examinations of Jewish life in the 1920s-40s, covering issues like Palestine, Zionism, World War II, communism, and labor politics, but also tells the stories through the lenses of art, fashion, and psychiatry. Tax used oral histories for her research, and the voices sound authentic. To me the most interesting and informative bits are the characters internal and external struggles with the party line and the multi-faceted views on the conflicting Zionist movements. The author does a good job of revealing multiple truths in these contentious topics, but you still have an idea where she's at personally. The sometimes disastrous relationship between the Communist Party and American labor, not to mention the difficulties it creates between father and daughter is sometimes painful to read, but fascinating stuff!

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful." is the opening sentence in the novella that was originally the prologue to DeLillo's 827 pager Underworld. It’s a striking line, a powerful one, and to me, someone who reads few books written by men, a masculine line. I wonder if a woman, or for that matter a person of color could have written it. That's not to say women and POC can't write stunning openers, it's to say that there's a confidence in DeLillo's sentiment, that others will relate to him, that his voice is "your voice." One of the main characters in the book is a 14-year-old African-American, but there are no women present in the whole 81 pages, except a mention toward the end of a photograph of Frank Sinatra (also a character in the novella)'s wife Ava Gardner's cleavage, and perhaps a few other reference to everymen's wives. I'm not pointing this out to criticize necessarily, but to say that in reading this book, I was not on my own turf.