No One Is Coming to Save Us is a revelatory debut from an insightful voice that combines a universally resonant story with an intimate glimpse into the hearts of one family. The Great Gatsby brilliantly recast in the contemporary South: a powerful first novel about an extended African-American family and their colliding visions of the American Dream. This article was originally published on TIME.Stephanie Powell Watts’ Debut Novel! No One Is Coming to Save Us Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Inaugural selection by Sarah Jessica Parker for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central Read More Named one of the best books of 2017 by Entertainment Weekly, W Magazine, Bustle, The Millions, Babble, Redbook, Elle, Nylon and The Chicago Review of Books In the best possible way, this is the kind of book that makes a reader yearn for her next one. To call Watts “promising” would diminish her significant accomplishments, which include a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction. Though disjointed in places, the novel conjures the “Is that all there is?” mood of Gatsby to great effect. like the vein in shrimp.” She also knows a thing or two about heartache, a must for any Gatsby pastiche: “When you love somebody you decide what you can take and what will kill you and work backward from what will kill you,” one unlucky-in-love character explains. Like Fitzgerald, Watts excels at physical descriptions that give texture to the world of the novel: a road curls “like a potato peel,” a fingernail overhangs “a dirty dust line.
If anyone offers a similar inside-outside perspective on the romance, it’s Ava’s mother, Sylvia, a woman whose pain and disillusionment do not augur a happy ending. J.J.’s former flame Ava, now married and regretfully childless, is a clear stand-in for Daisy, but there’s no Nick Carraway narrator here. The looseness frees her to build a narrative that stands on its own terms. Scott Fitzgerald story to keep (car accident, yes wild parties, no). Watts picks and chooses which elements of the F.
Ferguson, a machinist who’s made his money from government and corporate contracts, and the company he seeks is not the demimonde but the precariously middle-class black community where he came of age. Jay Gatsby is transported to contemporary North Carolina in Stephanie Powell Watts’s new book No One Is Coming to Save Us- but here, he’s J.J.
0 kommentar(er)
