Several years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote a long essay in Harper’s Magazine lamenting the demise of what he termed the “realistic” novel, a novel, perhaps of the city, a “slice of life, a cross section that provided a true and powerful picture of individuals and society…” He discussed Dickens, Steinbeck, Buck and other writers of classics of what used to be the canon and asserted that “The intelligentsia have always had contempt for the realistic novel — a form that wallows so enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life.” He also quotes post-modernist novelist John Hawkes as saying, “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, characters, setting and theme,” and indeed we have had years and years of novels who also eschewed such things.
My arguments with Wolfe may be plentiful, but he had and has a point. Novels which take on the huge and amazing American landscape fell out of favor for many years, and those that have managed to get published have often been relegated to genre labeling or called, as Wolfe so notes, “popular fiction.” While I personally adore the bizarre novels of Paul Auster, the hyper-attenuated fictions of Anita Brookner, and the “small” domestic tales of some of our best women writers, I am also a huge fan of a novel that tackles the breadth and scope of the peculiar American experience of the 20th century.
A novel that documents the issue of class, race, politics, commitment to cause, and a sense of the wonders of the modern world, is a novel that begs to be read. Such a novel is Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter, a novel for the people, about the people, and a novel which concerns itself with much of the “dirt of everyday life.”
Edward (Eddie) Wesley is a brilliant man caught up in a serious of momentous events in the very chaotic years between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War. Certainly that time afforded tumult galore: men and women trying to rid of the world of racism, sexism, classicism, and anything else that spoke of injustice. Into this already heady mix, author Stephen L. Carter, a law professor and intellectual, throws writer Eddie, his longtime great love Aurelia (a poseur who insinuates herself into one of the country’s wealthiest and most prominent black families) , and dozens of other fascinating men and women, including some real ones: JFK and Nixon most notably (Adam Clayton Powell and Langston Hughes, too), fashioning a novel that is at once a thriller of some merit, but more importantly a social commentary on men and women during an important and life-altering period in history.
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