The View from Here
(Click Title to Order)
by Brian Keith Jackson
Pub. Price $22.00 B&N Price: $15.40
Publisher: Pocket Books
Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: January 1997
Synopsis
A stunning debut novel in the tradition of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Anna
Anderson Thomas has devoted her life to stepping lightly around her husband's vast
silences and raising their sons. But now, with a sixth child on the way--a girl this time,
she's sure--Anna faces a challenge that threatens to destroy the family she's fought so
hard to preserve. 240 pp. NYC publicity. 25,000 print.
From Kirkus:
Cleanly written debut that begins modestly enough, with a simplicity worthy of a YA
audience, but loses its way once Jackson's preacherly instincts take over and his
characters become object lessons in righteous behavior. As some sort of homage, Jackson
sets his novel in the small Mississippi town of Eudora in Welty country, but it's more
like the town of Alice, as in Walker. Lest he be charged with a vision of relentless black
violence toward women, Jackson has his main character repent his ways and includes a shrew
of witchlike proportions. The story is plain enough: Covering the nine months before the
narrator's birth, the tale flashes back to her mother's courtship and marriage to one
Joseph Henry Thomas, a hard-working illiterate who considers his wife and four children
his property and rules the roost with an iron hand--and with a toughness penetrated only
by his older sister, Clariece, a mean and pretentious old cow married to a preacher.
Clariece certainly lords over Joseph's wife, Anna, the sweet and understanding center of
this family saga. Without consulting her, Joseph promises his sixth child, the narrator,
to his childless sister, an act that begins the rough times. For, in short order, Joseph
loses his job, Anna's best friend dies, and Joseph takes up with the bottle. But the
memory of Ida Mae, her wild and sassy friend, helps Anna through the crisis; in letters
addressed to Ida Mae interspersed throughout the novel, Anna builds the courage to
confront her cruel husband and his brutal sister. In Anna's moment of strength, Jackson
provides the chest-thumping moral: ``. . . women are the bearers of life, [and] we also
provide the strength that makes life worth living.'' The down-home parable-making here is
undermined by all the pop psych, making this, sadly, a perfect contender for the latest in
black schmaltz. -Kirkus
From Publisher's Weekly:
The view is from the womb in Jackson's extraordinary debut, most of which is narrated by
L'il Lisa, who begins speaking to us five months into her mother Anna's pregnancy.
(Readers may be reminded of Kate Atkinson's The View from the Museum.) Taking place over
the course of four months in the 1950s, the action centers around an African American
family isolated among the corn fields of rural Mississippi. Well before her birth, Lisa
knows her brooding, domineering father, J.T., won't allow Anna to keep the baby. With five
sons already, J.T. can't handle another mouth to feed and has arranged to give the child
to Clariece, his barren older sister, to rear. Clariece is pretentious, verbally and
physically abusive, belittling and dishonest. Himself raised by Clariece, T.J. has been so
thoroughly demeaned by her that he can't recognize her poisonous character. Anna wants to
keep Lisa and has faith that J.T. will come to his senses when his only daughter is born.
In addition to Lisa's narrative, Jackson threads poignant fragments of unmailed letters
written by Anna during her lonely pregnancy to her devoted childhood friend Ida Mae, who
has gone north and for whom Anna has no address. He also includes occasional third-person
passages which offer an omniscient perspective on Anna, Ida Mae and J.T. from their youth
up through Lisa's dramatic birth. Jackson orchestrates the three viewpoints like a skilled
composer, engaging the reader intellectually and emotionally. His descriptions are
understated but evocative, his dialogue natural and true to period regional idiom. A
formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller, he has written a haunting
story. (Feb.) -Publisher's Weekly
