Angela Davis Brown is in sixth grade the day her mother vanishes. No note, no warning, just gone. Her father, a magician, is ill equipped to deal with the public shame of his wife’s abandonment and the private burden of raising a daughter. He lies and dissembles, bumbles and bribes, attempting an emotional sleight of hand Angela never believes. “You wonder who’s worse,” she thinks. “The one who left or the one who stayed behind to screw up again and again and again. It’s a gunfight. The desperado wins… and when she walks off into the sunset, a round red piece of you slides around in her pocket, like a marble.”
Chambers–a former NEWSWEEK writer who now writes for the UPN series “Girlfriends”–sets Angela’s struggle in 1970s Brooklyn, in the days of straightening combs and Cleopatra Jones, Muhammad Ali and “Mahogany,” “Good Times” and Assata Shakur. The book pulses with a sense of time and place that never overpowers the story’s emotional rhythm. Chambers’s gift for detail both charms and chills. Rather than keeping her mother’s photo in her pocket, Angela packs around a copy of her dental X-rays. “I told myself that the wedding picture was too painful a memory to keep close at hand. However, if I’m honest, I carry a picture of her teeth to remind myself of the pain: of how she bit me and the way she left me to live, part of me breathing, part of me dead.” Amid such confessions, the plot is almost secondary. Very little actually “happens” to Angela; the narrative is internal. Because of this, the pace sometimes lags, but perhaps this is Chambers’s intention. All that frustration and impatience, that need to comprehend why and how a mother could leave her child, seeps through every page. Like Angela, we wait for answers we may never find. –Sean Smith
“Sometimes I think the only memories worth having are the ones that are private,” Teddy Ravan tells his son Wils, the narrator of Ward Just’s “An Unfinished Season.” Wils can’t imagine his father means what he says but, at 19, he soon discovers he’s collected enough private memories to last a lifetime. Even if the setting of Just’s 14th novel is the Midwest instead of Washington, Saigon or Paris, the territory is familiar: it’s the world of memory tinged with regret.
It’s the early 1950s, the dawn of the cold war and the Red scare. Wils is eager to be off to college, to begin a new life–but the life he’s leaving behind keeps changing. His father starts receiving death threats from striking workers at his printing plant and his mother pushes him to sell his business. Eventually she wins, breaking his spirit. When Wils finds his first girlfriend, the daughter of a famed psychiatrist, he’s convinced his new life is starting. As Just’s readers know by now, nothing is ever that simple. Instead, he stumbles into more secrets, another family tragedy, another broken spirit. This is vintage Just: elegant writing that captures the wounded spirit of the times and the ache in Wils’s young heart. –Andrew Nagorski
