She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. Major tells it the way it is with a magical-realist twist, but a tendency to replace dialogue with posturing and speeches undermines her story’s impact. Ultimately, he’s persuaded to make the trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington that Ranger had promised him-but with his stepfather instead. Victoria befriends Sketch, but he can’t bear to go home again after his dad’s death, living instead with friends and on the street. Also witnesses are Victoria, an old woman who paints herself white in order to believe herself invisible in public, and her companion, the ghost-narrator.
Ranger wants to get clean, but just at the moment when he may have reached his goal he’s gunned down, a bystander in a drive-by witnessed by Sketch. Ranger, the dad, is a Vietnam vet dragged low by drugs, which end his marriage but not his contact with his now-pregnant sister Dawa or his teenaged son Sketch, a talented graffiti artist already in trouble with the law for his art, with whom Ranger sometimes connects at his mother Lucille’s place. With a surname like Everman, there’s no avoiding the allegorical intent in what befalls this family in the Fillmore district of San Francisco.
Poet and storywriter Major returns, less forcefully, to the extended black family theme of An Open Weave (1995) in her second outing: a tale that conjures up a centuries-old ghost as narrator in detailing the tragic consequences of Vietnam, drugs, racism, and urban renewal in the decline of a once-thriving black community.
0 kommentar(er)
