August 20th, 2008
You Don’t Know Me1 comment
August 13th, 2008
Pharmakon1 comment
July 30th, 2008
Zak Sally, At The Pony Club | When Mickey started drinking, that’s when things got interesting.0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
Writer’s Edge Faculty Reading | The collective literary fringe new and now.0 comments
July 16th, 2008
COMIC BOOK TATTOO, Various Artists | The Portland/Tori Amos/Sandman connection revealed.0 comments
July 9th, 2008
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | It’s like Hamlet, but with puppies.3 comments
July 2nd, 2008
While They Slept, Kathryn Harrison | A triple murder hits close to home.1 comment
June 25th, 2008
Andre Dubus III, The Garden Of Last Days | A stripper, a big tipper and two towers.0 comments
June 18th, 2008
Sasa Stanisic, How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone | What kids talk about when they talk about war.2 comments
June 18th, 2008
Joseph O’Neill Netherland | A new novel set in post-9/11 New York simply isn’t cricket (it’s Seinfeld).0 comments
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[January 16th, 2008]
In Them , Nathan McCall’s debut novel (Atria Books, 338 pages, $25) , the title refers both to the black residents of one Atlanta inner-city ward and the young white “urban homesteaders” who are moving in, snapping up properties, and literally changing the neighborhood’s complexion. They might mean well, but in this uneasy tale of gentrification the road to hell is paved with good intentions, lined with reasonably priced fixer-uppers, and blessed with fine architectural details and a great view of downtown.
The close-in Old Fourth Ward may be shabby, but it’s been home to generations of Atlanta black families. Suddenly it’s on real-estate agents’ radar (they follow the gay pride flags), and overnight the Old Fourth’s oil-drum barbecues and dice games are being replaced by Labradors and jogging strollers. The new folks see themselves as pioneers…but the longtime residents see them as colonizers.
Taciturn renter Barlowe Reed has lived in the Old Fourth Ward for years and dreams of buying his house, but all the sales are going to people like his new neighbors Sean and Sandy Gilmore, the latest ex-suburbanites on the block. Barlowe and Sandy attempt a sort of back-fence acquaintanceship (much to Sean’s disapproval), but the gulf between their perceptions and experiences is just too wide.
“I can’t win,” wails Sandy, after Barlowe questions her motivations one too many times. “You already won,” he informs her, going back inside.
Meanwhile, the Seans and Sandys can’t help but turn their new neighborhood into a boutique district of pottery shops and spendy bistros, all the while stroking themselves for their “diversity.” With each new arrival, the Old Fourth looks more like the suburbs the Gilmores left behind; with each new departure, the authentic community is diminished. The improvement in city services that follows the arrival of the whites—freshly paved roads, police patrols—is particularly infuriating to the long-neglected locals. And marching ever closer: condominiums.
By the time the local mini-mart, a decades-old neighborhood hangout, becomes a latte joint catering to dreadlocked white creative-class types, Them takes on the inexorable pull of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing —the only question is what the flashpoint will be, and who will be hurt by novel’s end.
McCall draws his characters with a broad pen (with the exception of Barlowe), and includes some heavy-handed symbolism involving a cote of homing pigeons on a back porch. But there’s something to make readers wince with recognition in every chapter; when a pair of clueless white residents approach an elderly black man, petitions in hand for a new bike path the old man couldn’t care less about, McCall’s Atlanta feels uncomfortably like our Alberta.
RECENT COMMENTS ON “Nathan McCall, Them: A Novel”
fyi. good stuff. lp









