β Scribed by Cheuse, Alan
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Cheuse's busy follow-up to To Catch the Lightning reaches frantically in multiple directions but lacks a center of narrative gravity, resulting in a florid and off-kilter tale of slavery and forbidden love. Nathaniel Pereira, son of a New York Jewish merchant, gets dispatched to revive an uncle's South Carolina plantation, but his story is derailed by the interspersed accounts of several generations of women driven from slavery in Timbuktu to bondage in the United States. On a slave voyage, the brutality is as vivid as the prose is lurid ("What happened next, we can never truly know, unless we find ourselves forced into the immediate degradation sometimes suffered by the victim, usually female, when man turns beast and instinctβraw, foul, animal, devilish, destructive instinctβoverpowers her"), and once the plantation slave Liza becomes an object of purplish desire for Nathaniel (a "tincture of desire now flavoring the spittle that we mingled in our mouths"), readers will realize that things cannot end well. After the convoluted story finds its way to a fiery conclusion, Cheuse tacks on a rushed and tidy resolution that undermines the novel's strongest feature: its depiction of the horrors of slavery. (Mar.)
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Cheuse, author of To Catch the Lightning (2008), tackles another complex subject in his latest historical novel. Sent by his father to observe and evaluate his uncle's South Carolina rice plantation as a possible business investment, New York Jew and fledgling entrepreneur Nathaniel Pereira is horrified by his first brush with the brutal realities of slavery. Especially struck by the irony of how a people who themselves lived in bondage for so long could now own slaves, he is torn between his conscience and his duty. His moral dilemma becomes even more complex after he becomes captivated by Liza, a beautiful slave who harbors a shattering secret. A parallel story, passed through the generations from mother to daughter, chronicles the odyssey of one slave family from sixteenth-century Timbuktu to the antebellum South. As the two narratives unfold, eventually becoming one, the tangled history of slavery and the enduring stain it left upon a nation founded on the principles of freedom and equality is evocatively illuminated. --Margaret Flanagan
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