City of Refuge
Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge has been billed as the THE great Hurricane Katrina novel. The novel is blurbed by Richard Ford AND Richard Russo, who both sing its praises. I was impressed with Piazza’s non-fiction Katrina book, Why New Orleans Matters. I’m from New Orleans, and I’m working my way through the growing Katrina genre, one book at a time. Clearly, this is a book that was bound to find its way to my “to be read” stack.
City of Refuge tells a tale of two cities. Unfortunately the author is not Dickens. One family, The Williams, are black and live in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Award – ground zero for the levee breach that would flood the city. The other family, The Donaldsons, are white and live near Uptown New Orleans, which is now called the “Isle of Denial” – an area of the city that did not flood. Does that seem formulaic? It mostly reads that way, too. There are no black doctors, writers, or – well, professionals of any kind. There are no poor white people. The two families read initially as cartoonish stand-ins.
The book begins slowly with the author doing a lot of “telling” rather than “showing” – this is especially true when Piazza describes the Donaldsons psychodrama back story. The wife is distant and cries in the night because she would rather not live in New Orleans, etc. Craig Donaldson (like Piazza) is not a native of New Orleans, so he spends a lot of the novel’s early pages establishing his bona fides. For example, if there’s music playing it will only be obscure New Orleans R&B, blues, and jazz acts, to the exclusion of everything else. There is also a running joke in the novel that Craig and his pals can pick out people that aren’t from New Orleans – they’re the people who aren’t wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip flops at all times. Craig, to a NEw Orleans native, does not seem recognizable as a typical New Orleanian. That’s problematic since he seems to be represting an entire demographic of the city.
The author chose to write the dialog for the black family in dialect, which can often be a questionable call. For what it is worth, he more or less nailed it. However, I still thought it was a problem in this novel, because, apparently, only black people have a distinct dialect in New Orleans. I’m here to tell you that white folks in New Orleans have a very unique accent (butchered in numerous films) that is absent in this book. If you’re going to do dialect, write it for everybody, especially when the dialect is so rich and communicates the culture of the city so well.
OK, numerous gripes aside, once the storm hits and Piazza’s families have to deal with the crisis at hand, the author writes with an immediacy and emotional authority that are missing from the rest of the novel. The ordeal of the storm finally provides the characters with something that feels genuine. As a result, the “after” is much better than the “before.”
There are some bits of comedy that are not surprisingly sparse, given the novel’s subject matter. The novel includes a minor character, Serge Mikulic, who is a stand-in for Romanian ex-patriate, author, poet, NPR commentator, and bar stool philosopher Andre Codrescu. Codrescu Mikulic gets scenes like this:
“Gowing up in a corrupt pestilential backwater has given me invaluable insight into other corrupt pestilential backwater,” he once famously remarked. ”I was made for New Orleans.”
If Codrescu didn’t actually say those precise words, he has said something remarkably similar. I’m not sure if Codrescu has grounds to sue. Another comedic note comes when Craig (an editor for an alt-weekly named Gumbo) comes up with the headline for a review of a new Philip Roth novel – The Gripes of Roth. I liked that one.
City of Refuge, despite its faults, seems to at least have it heart in the right place. It pains me to be so hard on it. Did it help that I was reading this book while my family was fleeing from Hurricane Gustav only to turn around and take in people fleeing from Hurricane Ike. Probably not. I was definitely in a place where the dread of hurricane devastation was very real. Verdict: The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke retains the title as THE great Hurricane Katrina novel.
September 29, 2008 7:23 am 3 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Subscribe
By Kerry, October 2, 2008 @ 9:29 am
I just finished reading Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden, which is not a Katrina book per se, but just fits in amongst the criteria. It was a fabulous read, like nothing else I’ve ever read before (and I’ll be posting a review v. soon). But I’ve never been to New Orleans, had nothing to compare her fiction to. Would be very interested in what you think of this novel…
By Tim, October 2, 2008 @ 10:53 am
I’ll keep an eye out for your review, Kerry. I’m intrigued.
By Becky, October 4, 2008 @ 12:35 am
I just finished reading a great Hurricane Katrina book titled, “Recovering Charles,” by Jason Wright. It is a great heart warming fictional story with facts about a historically tragic event. A perfect book for everyone! I am now more interested in Hurricane Katrina than ever, and am excited to read some of the books that you have suggested above. Thank you for the great tips.