Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. A GOOD NEIGHBORHOODBy Therese Anne Fowler The acknowledgments section of “A Good Neighborhood” appears just before the first chapter, and Therese Anne Fowler begins by acknowledging herself — specifically “the matter of me, a white author, needing to create points of view for two African-American characters. ” To pre-empt any criticism, she paraphrases Zadie Smith, who reportedly told a white author who was anxious about writing black characters, “Just do your homework. ” “I approached the project with respect,” Fowler assures us, and the story that follows is, in her words, “a kind of activism in our troubled and troubling times.
” But her novel breaks the promise of its premise, revealing weaknesses in both craft and conviction. In the same way that activism cannot be sold for $26, black characters cannot be bought when they lack depth and accessibility. The story starts with the residents of Oak Knoll, “a desirable neighborhood in the middle of a desirable North Carolina city,” and the bold choice of first-person plural. “We sow the seeds — we hope — of prevention of future sorrows,” they say.
“Is this a cautionary tale? We think it is — but we wish it weren’t. ” The Greek chorus gossips to the reader, often using assumed shared references to do the heavy lifting. (“We’ve all seen enough cop shows to have a sense of what life is like inside a county jail,” they say.
“And if you’ve read a John Grisham or Jodi Picoult novel, you’ve been to court. ”) So, who are these residents? And by extension, who are we? Ecology professors.
Nonprofit executives. Cultural anthropologists. Operating-room nurses. While these professions suggest a degree of financial stability, if not affluence, Fowler emphasizes that the denizens of Oak Knoll aren’t ostentatious, like the “yuppies” in the “big graceless houses in new outlying subdivisions” or the “blue bloods” and industrial titans in nearby “fairy-tale” mansions.
Oak Knoll residents “treated one another with kindness and respect. ” They live in a zenlike mirage of modesty, until the nouveau-riche Whitmans arrive. Valerie Alston-Holt, a black mother, ecology professor and “activist,” sues her new neighbor, Brad Whitman, for killing a tree while constructing his lavish house. “It’s like they’re raping the landscape,” she says, but Valerie’s activism has a distinctly Nimby execution; by “landscape,” she means her own backyard.
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The teenagers from the two families begin dating in secret, adding fuel to this tepid fire. If you want to know how to feel about these characters, the novel will tell you. Valerie is valiant. There’s the Bad White Man, Brad Whitman.
The ingénue is Juniper Whitman, nicknamed JuniPure. And there’s Valerie’s son: the wunderkind savior, Xavier. The characters operate on a narrow scope of good and bad, defined by their taste and consumption habits. Good characters love trees (but not “Disney World shrubs”).
They discuss “Lolita” at book clubs in their “modest brick ranch” homes. They compost their leftovers and forgo foie gras. Brad Whitman, the book’s Trumpian villain, is defined by his gaudy home, his six televisions, the celebratory Maserati window sticker that he tacks on his bulletin board and the déclassé pride he takes in his HVAC company’s local commercials. The systems that allow this extreme inequality go unexamined, but the ways in which wealth is exhibited are scrutinized in microscopic (and clichéd) detail: “He’d display his money like a peacock displayed its tail feathers.
” Fowler’s portrayal of white supremacy is similarly hampered. A biracial couple walking through a craft fair is met with either “hostile stares” or “approving smiles. ” When the story briefly takes us to Jackson, Miss.
“, Fowler lingers over the fact that Jackson’s airport is named after Medgar Evers, while Mississippi still flies the Confederate flag.”
“This kind of dichotomy,” we are told, “is the South in a nutshell. ” Racism is depicted much like death or pregnancy, in that it is an all-or-nothing, binary state of being. The racist characters are brazenly racist: They call biracial children “abominations” and freely use the n-word. The nonracist characters are professional allies; one is actually martyred, in a ludicrous series of events, after storming away from a racist relative.
This binary may make sense in the comforting world of “A Good Neighborhood” but it reveals little about the world we live in, where good intentions often nourish white supremacy, the way sugar feeds yeast. In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin lambastes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s one-dimensional portrayal of Uncle Tom. “The protest novel,” he writes, “becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives … to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe. ” Stowe’s Uncle Tom, “her only black man, has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.
” Much like Uncle Tom, Xavier, the perfect biracial teenager, is presented as a nonthreatening fantasy for the book’s white audience. When a girl sexts Xavier, inviting him for a repeat of an encounter they’ve had together, he mechanistically thinks, “What straight cis male wouldn’t? ” But Xavier wouldn’t, because when it came to “hookup culture,” “he’d figured out fast he wasn’t built for that. ” An absurd amount of real estate is given to Xavier’s “good grades, good work ethic, good recommendations.
” Before eating an apple, he shines it on his shirt. Just as Brad Whitman functions as a testimony against flamboyant spending, Xavier operates as a paragon of humility. His car? A paint-flaking Honda.
His guitar? He saved up for it by working a minimum-wage job, “without a lot of complaint. ” His matriculation at an elite private college? By means of a “substantial” scholarship.
Xavier’s bootstrapping is matched with an active rejection of surface symbols of blackness and hip-hop. “I hate cornbread,” he says. Out loud. To himself.
The idea of wearing diamond earrings? Xavier says, “As if. ” When things turn dire for Xavier, his respectability politics are all he has to cling to: “He wasn’t just some random black perp, a thug from the ’hood. He was half white (not that it should matter).
” Upon discovering the apostrophe in front of the word ’hood, I was overcome and placed the novel down. As far as Fowler’s black characters are concerned, to quote Baldwin, “We have only the author’s word that they are Negro and they are, in all other respects, as white as she can make them. ” “A Good Neighborhood” is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors of allyship — not to be confused with indictments of systemic oppression — can limit a novel’s understanding of human behavior. It provides the same frustration one feels at Thanksgiving, when your self-described open-minded aunt won’t shut up about the beautiful gay couple she waves to at the gym.
Is it possible to enjoy a work of art with bad politics? Absolutely. I’ve seen “Pretty Woman” nine times, minimum. But when a story is presented as art and activism, it becomes the reader’s responsibility to take the novel at its repetitive word.
Here, in this good neighborhood, it is not a tragedy that violence happens to black men, but rather, that it can happen to one of the good ones. If America is a house on fire, “A Good Neighborhood” is mostly concerned with exiting quietly, in a single-file line.
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