Music, race and friendship

Imagine a secret friendship in a small North Carolina town between two high school boys in 1963, one black, the other white. Clyde Edgerton’s The Night Train captures the yearning of Larry Lime Nolan—of that bunch of Nolans with the funny names like “Sammy My Good God Almighty Nolan” or “Seaboard Air Line Railroad Kitchen Nolan “because he’d been born in the kitchen when the dern night train was coming through”—and Dwayne Hallston for adulthood and escape from Prestonville, N.C. United by their love of music, they work together at Dwayne’s father’s furniture store.

{module Share this!|none}Larry’s mother hopes that jazz “might get him outen the South,” she thought. It was a familiar thought for all her children—with other words for ‘jazz.’” Larry’s piano lessons expand. The Bleeder, a hemophiliac he meets at The Frog, a jazz club on the outskirts of town, takes him under his wing, mentors him by teaching him to hear different colors in chords, and teaches him to feel magic via Thelonious Monk.

Likewise, Dwayne’s singing and performance with his boy band assumes new flavors and complexity as Larry introduces him to the new James Brown album “Live at the Apollo.” Dwayne ingests, mimics, and becomes “the hardest working-man in show business” and convinces his band, the Amazing Rumblers, that learning the songs and stylings was their ticket to winning an audition on Bobby Lee Reese’s country music show, the only show on at 10:30 on Saturday nights.

Edgerton returns readers to the segregated South that many may recall, when Monday was the night that Blacks could recreate at Junebug’s Skating Rink; when domestic labor could be negotiated at fifty cents an hour; when the editor, reporter, and photographer at the newspaper was called because a white boy tried to sneak a black boy into the drive-in theater via the trunk of a 1960 Buick.

Racial tension laces the pages of The Night Train, but so does humor. Larry’s dancing chicken Redbird makes for comical moments, as does Dwayne’s attempt to throw a mean rooster over the balcony at the theater during a matinee of “The Birds.” Home audiences tuned into Bobby Reese’s music show to hear stories of his backward relatives, but also to watch him toss dry dog food into the air and eat it; that was his shtick.

The Night Train by Clyde Edgerton. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011. ISBN 0316117595.

Following Fangs makes for a ‘weird book’

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson. NY: Ecco, 2011. ISBN 0061579033.

When Annie Fang hanged up the phone with Officer Dunham, she grabbed a bottle of vodka and drank from it. Her brother asked, “What did Mom and Dad do?” And Annie replied, “Something awful,” because when the Fang family van was discovered abandoned along the Tennessee-North Carolina line, the adult children never suspected foul play. Given the amount of blood detectives found at the scene, and the recent history of brutal murders along the two states’ borders, the police were sure the Fang disappearance was not another infamous performance art event. Annie and Buster were not convinced.

 The Family Fang follows the lives of Annie and Buster, sometimes referred to as Child A or Child B, who unwillingly participated in performance art events staged at malls by their artist parents, Caleb and Camille. But why malls? It was all accidental. Annie squalled and vomited on Santa’s lap. A light bulb illuminated Caleb’s mind: “You have a bunch of people, hypnotized by all this material consumption, stuck inside a big maze of a building that throws off their equilibrium.” Then, after discovering that they could create chaos by placing Annie in situations in which she’d be terrified, they discovered a way to integrate their children into their art because their mentor Hobart Waxman had convinced them that “Kids Kill Art.”

The seed for The Family Fang grew from Kevin Wilson’s own experience as a new father. I heard him speak at a panel on Southern Fiction at the American Library Association’s annual conference in New Orleans in June this year, where I scored an uncorrected proof which he signed “with hopes that you like this weird book,” and he said that being a parent scared him because all the ways that you can screw up your children turn parenting into an awesome responsibility. Then, of course, his imagination ran away with him in the ways that parents could actually screw up their children.

After performing at her parents’ behest for all those years, Annie turns to acting so that recognition in the midst of a Fang event would ruin her parents’ art. Buster published two novels and knows some success as a journalist until he suffers a severe head wound due to a potato gun blast at the hands of Iraqi War veterans, which sends him home to Tennessee. Likewise, a Hollywood scandal has Annie traveling east toward home as well and the convergence of four adult Fangs incite the Fang parents’ final performance.