Word: carll
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jessie, a New York Jew who fought through the civil rights wars with her husband, wants to sell. Not sell out, just abandon a pose of high-minded poverty that is not accomplishing anything, and move to a decent house in an integrated neighborhood. Carll won't budge. Then his sister and brother-in-law, affluent segregationists from Birmingham, are killed in a car accident. Their two children, mannerly young racists, move in with Carll and Jessie. More space is needed, and Carll acquiesces sulkily when Jessie finds a larger house in a middle-class neighborhood...
With this change of scene, the novel shifts its focus from Carll's aimlessness to Jessie's desperate efforts to stabilize her in-laws' children at some workable level of sanity and racial tolerance. She succeeds, it appears, with one, a hardy eight-year-old boy, and is on the point of failing with the other, a neurasthenic 13-year-old girl who wobbles in adolescent self-pity to ward the Ku Klux Klan, suicide or both...
...battle. Unfortunately, Jessie comes to overshadow her husband, who would make a fine dramatic contrast to her if he were allowed to spend some time onstage. But Brown sends him packing off for days at a time on vague errands, while Jessie stays at home and copes. When Carll does involve himself in a misbegotten civil rights march, the action takes place beyond the reader's view. When he spends a few hours in the new house that he holds in such contempt, his behavior is noted through his wife's eyes, and Jessie's thoughts...
Late in the book a parallel is developed between Carll and Jessie's father, an oldtime Communist who once left his family for two years on party orders and who now spends his time grumbling about his wife's bourgeois taste in furniture. The coincidence of husband and father immobilized by idealism gone stale is interesting. But in the end it hurts a novel in which there is no adult male with substance enough to cast a shadow. This is true even for minor characters; an interracial couple friendly to Jessie and Carll consists of a black wife...
Well, why not? There is a lot of male invisibility going around these days. How should an out-of-date hero spend his time? Must idealism always be corrosive, as well as ennobling? Jessie does not know, but she is busy with the children. Can Carll see any glimmers of hope or despair? The reader never finds out much about this man, because Brown does not take the trouble to give him a fully drawn character. As things are, what we are given by this gifted author, who wrote the much praised 1978 novel Tender Mercies, is chiefly a very...