26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ENGROSSING, FORCEFUL, AND IMPECCABLY CRAFTED, September 4, 2006
This review is from: All Aunt Hagar's Children (Hardcover)
Some things are well worth waiting for and Edward P. Jonses's follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel "The Known World" (2003) is most assuredly one of them. Once again he uses short story formats to illuminate and make memorable his characters, ordinary people, really, but to the reader they are unforgettable. This author's evocation of black life in America is incomparable.
The 14 stories that comprise "All Aunt Hagar's Children" are set in Washington, the city where Jones was raised and now lives. He opens with "In The Blink of God's Eye," the story of Ruth and Aubrey, a young couple in their late teens and recently married. Ruth does not always rest well in "godforsaken Washington" while Aubrey "always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood." One night when Ruth was wakeful she went out in back where she found a baby tied in a bundle hanging from a tree limb. Thus, she thought Washington was "a city where they hung babies in night trees."
As is his wont Jones treats readers to the earlier lives of his characters, rendering them all the more accessible and sympathetic. This is especially true in "Resurrecting Methuselah" in which we meet Anita Channing who sits by the bedside of Bethany, her ill daughter. She sits in a wooden chair built a century and a half ago by a former slave. Anita's husband, Percival, is serving in Okinawa, where he spends much time with a prostitute, Sara Lee. When Percival discovers he has breast cancer he calls Anita and asks her to come to him. She reaches Honolulu, a stopover in her flight, where she has an opportunity to look back on her childhood and wonder what the future holds for herself and her child.
"All Aunt Hagar's Children" concludes with "Tapestry," another story of a young couple, Anne and George, marrying and leaving their rural roots behind. George is a porter on a train, the train that carries them to Washington. As the train slows close to its destination Anne whispers, Mama, Papa, "I'm a long way from home."
For this reader that was the gist of all of these marvelous stories, people seeking a better life a long way from home.
Jones is such an incredibly gifted writer, his prose is succinct, true, impeccably crafted. Reading his work is not only a pleasure but a privilege as well.
- Gail Cooke
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Children We Would Have Never Known About, March 12, 2007
This review is from: All Aunt Hagar's Children (Hardcover)
In his second book of short stories, Edward P. Jones does a wonderful job of chronicling the African-American experience in All Aunt Hagar' Children. Just as Lost in the City did, Jones brings to life a city that is hardly ever written about, Washington, D.C., and uses fourteen tales to describe circumstances that include life inside of homes full of love, and those without and those that are wealthy and those that are struggling.
Jones' depictions are as real as it gets, thoroughly describing life for Blacks fleeing an angry South to a new beginning in their first experience of living an "urban" American life from the early 1900's all the way to the mid-twentieth century and the loneliness it may sometimes bring. For example, "In the Blink of God's Eye" is about a newlywed couple that moves from Virginia to Washington, D.C. From the way Jones writes, the reader would assume that the couple traveled all the way to Washington State, because that is just how much home was missed for the young bride and how far away it seemed to her. In the title story, "All Aunt Hagar's Children", a hopeless young man aspires to go to Alaska to hunt for gold but in the meantime, spends his days helping a neighbor solve the mystery of how her son was murdered while also dodging an ex-girlfriend that he perceives to be angry.
Overall, this reader really enjoyed Jones' ability to tell a story but at times, wanted it to be longer and did not feel that the short story version could give these stories justice. At other times, the story was just long enough to get to know the characters and get a meaning out of the story that could resonate. Avid readers of Edward P. Jones will definitely want to add this collection to their libraries and will pick their favorites within All Aunt Hagar's Children.
Reviewed by Lena Willis
APOOO BookClub
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
clean, aching storytelling from a master..., October 16, 2006
This review is from: All Aunt Hagar's Children (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Joanna Pearson for Small Spiral Notebook
Since the 2003 publication of his novel The Known World, Edward P. Jones has picked up the occasional award--a MacArthur here, a Pulitzer there--but had there been any doubt about his place in the pantheon, his new book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children, secures it. Taken as a whole, Jones's works (including his 2004 short-story collection Lost in the City) do for 20th-century Washington, D.C., what Joyce's Dubliners did for Dublin: create that city within our literary imaginations.
This is not the Washington of bright-faced interns brandishing fresh degrees. Jones's city is a place where African-Americans newly arrived from the rural South grapple with their first experience of urban life in the early 1900's and then continue to make lives for themselves into the mid-twentieth century. Although Jones depicts this time, when certain parts of rural community life still remained intact, with great nostalgia, his characters all struggle within the vast new loneliness of urban life. In the book's the first story, "In the Blink of God's Eye," two newlyweds move to Washington from Virginia:
[Aubrey] smiled when he said Ruth's name, and he smiled when he told people he was going to live in Washington, D.C. Ruth had no feeling for Washington. She had generations of family in Virginia, but she was a married woman and had pledged to cling to her husband. And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.
Ruth's fear that wolves roam the D.C. streets seems symptomatic of her new loneliness and vulnerability as a result of her sudden distance from the Virginia family that used to surround her. The baby is a foundling Ruth insists on bringing home, even though the baby's presence threatens her husband, who fears this impenetrable closeness between the woman he married and a child who is not his own. As Ruth's love for this orphaned baby grows and her feelings for her husband weaken, it becomes clear that in this new city, family will come to be defined not as the people you're supposed to love but as the people you actually do love--a change that will affect both Aubrey and Ruth's lives permanently.
This story, set as it is in 1901, seems to forecast the new but delicate sort of family life that will evolve as the twentieth century unfolds--the family life of the Washington neighborhood, still steeped in a collective Southernness--that Jones explores in the stories that follow. This is a Washington of old women whom all the neighborhood children call Grandma, and festive Saturdays on H Street; a place where everyone has an aunt in Alabama and Mississippi, and the devil could swim right across the Anacostia River. Even this new urban family, however, will not be completely viable.
In the story "A Rich Man," Horace, the seventy-something charmer and flirt of a senior citizens' residence, takes up with a bunch of twenty-something partiers. Horace thinks that his new life is exactly what he's always wanted, until his new friends end up stealing from under his nose and he finds himself in unexpected trouble. Sometimes, Jones suggests, you don't really want what you've hoped for. Or, as in the story "Root Worker," maybe you yourself have perpetuated the trouble of those you seek to help. In this story a young doctor must accompany her ailing mother when the elderly woman seeks treatment from a traditional healer in rural North Carolina. For Glynnis, the doctor, this collision is uncomfortable, but the trip ultimately gives her insight into both herself and her family, as well as a belief of sorts in the bad voodoo of her own making.
The sectarianism of Washington lurking in the periphery of these stories is writ in black and white. But the divisions extend further than simple race, and Jones doesn't shy away from exploring the classism that emerges with the African-American neighborhoods. These families in Washington have new aspirations for advancing in class and acquiring wealth, and some families have the access to higher education to make good. The story "Bad Neighbors" illustrates this beautifully. Sharon grows up to marry the groomed, Howard-educated good neighbor boy. Meanwhile, Derek and his family, the "bad neighbors" with their run-down cars and ragged-looking children, serve as a reminder of the image that the rest of the community is trying to escape. They are kicked out of their house by their neighbors. Even so, it is Derek who demonstrates the grace, loyalty, and good timing to help Sharon when she needs it years later.
These stories amount to clean, aching storytelling from a master. Many reviewers have referred to Jones's God-like perspective, from which he reveals, often within the same sentence, hints about a character's past, present, and future--he'll often throw chronology aside and hint at how the distant future will relate to a particular character, like the narrative voiceover in a history documentary. Perhaps in lesser hands, this stance would seem overwhelming or even grandiose, but here it only adds to an overall feeling of historical truth and great scope. There is great sadness, loneliness, and love here. Perhaps as good an example as any is the book's dedication:
To my sister
Eunice Ann Mary Jones-Washington
and
to the multitudes who came up out of the South
for something better, something different, and, again,
to the memory of my mother,
Jeanette S. M. Jones,
who came as well and found far less
than even the little she dared hope for
That, if for no other reason, is why we will read Edward P. Jones's work: for that heartbreaking hope, both its presence and absence, and how all that's hoped for ultimately breaks the heart.
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