A Good Neighborhood
By Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martin's Press
If you’re looking for a compelling novel to take your mind completely away from covid-19, at least for a while, look no further.
A Good Neighborhood, by Theresa Anne Fowler, is such a novel.
It literally kept me up all night to find out the ending and it shattered me long after that.
This is the story of several social problems in the United States today – racism, first and foremost, but also economic inequality and its ugly ramifications.
Oak Knoll in North Carolina is the “good neighborhood” of the title. It’s where Valerie Alston-Holt, a black professor of forestry and ecology, is raising her biracial son, Xavier, who is on track for a music scholarship at a prestigious university. All is well, until a showplace home with a swimming pool is built next door, possibly compromising a tree on the Alston-Holt property. The family next door is showy, just like their house.
Trouble is cemented when Xavier and the girl next door Juniper become interested in each other.
This is the third novel for author Fowler, who lives in North Carolina. Her first two novels were historical, whereas this one is definitely modern. Her others are Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and A Well-Behaved Woman, which is about Alva Vanderbilt. I haven’t read either of those books, but after experiencing Fowler’s style in A Good Neighborhood, I likely will.
Fowler addresses one issue in the book’s acknowledgements, which are presented at the front of the book, before the story begins. She says the story came to her mind and felt urgent.
“To write their story felt necessary, a kind of activism in our troubled and troubling times,” she writes.
But there was a problem. She’s white and the story requires the point of view of two African American characters. She took inspiration from a talk by Zadie Smith, during which she says Smith said authors can write from any point of view, as long as they’ve done their homework.
“I did extensive homework (on that issue and all the other relevant ones) and with everything I’d learned in mind, I wrote this novel,” Fowler says.
I cannot say whether or not she pulled it off, because I am also white. But what I can say is that I found this story absolutely riveting.
Part of it is told from the perspective of the neighborhood. As a reader, at first I found this approach jarring, but once I got used to it, I found it effective. It’s a way for Fowler to zoom out of the main characters’ perspective and give readers not only the gossipy bits, but also some historical context.
Fowler took on an ambitious project and for the most part, she succeeds.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com
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