Babylon Rolling: A Novel [Hardcover]

Amanda Boyden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2008

From the acclaimed author of Pretty Little Dirty ("a first novel of complex truth and beauty"--San Francisco Chronicle), comes a glittering, gritty, and unflinching story of five families--black, white, and Indian--living along one block of Uptown, New Orleans.

It is the summer of 2004, and Orchid Street is changing. Newcomers Ariel May and her husband, Ed, relocated from Minnesota, are trying to make sense of the Southern city. From her front porch, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges watches her new neighbors, the Guptas, as they move into one of the biggest homes. Across the way, Daniel Harris, aka Fearius, has just been released from juvenile detention. And Cerise Brown, a longtime resident now in her late seventies, hopes only to pass the rest of her days in peace.

But with one random accident, a scene of horror on Cerise's front lawn, the whole neighborhood converges on the sidewalk to help, to cast blame, and to offer hope. And as Hurricane Ivan churns his way toward the city, bringing a different series of challenges, these new relationships tighten, intertwining the families' paths for better and for worse.

Told in five achingly real voices, Babylon Rolling is the story of one year on Orchid Street, a place where lives clash and collide, and where the humid air is charged with constant wanting. Offering a bold understanding of human nature and the hidden prejudices we harbor, Babylon Rolling is a powerful portrait of racism in America and a city on the edge of transformation.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A family from Minneapolis relocates to New Orleans one year before Katrina and settles on Orchard Street, partly because it offers a rich human gumbo of whites, blacks, Asians, and Tulane students. The family members want to revel in the diversity, but they also recoil at some of the differences they encounter. At the same time, the marital stresses between husband and wife are deepening. Babylon Rolling is a chronicle of life on Orchard Street during that year before disaster. It is an engaging and keenly observant book, a kind of literary block party in which the residents of Orchard Street come to life. Whether Boyden’s focus is on a black teenager who embarks on a career in the drug trade by dubbing himself Fearius, or on the Minnesota transplants’ reactions to their new home, or on the fierce heat and humidity, or the wondrous smells that waft from kitchens, or racial tensions, there is an honesty and bedrock reality to this novel that is never less than compelling. Boyden’s Pretty Little Dirty (2006) was a first novel of promise. Babylon Rolling fulfills that promise. --Thomas Gaughan

Review

ACCLAIM FOR AMANDA BOYDEN

BABYLON ROLLING

“Set in the chaotic months surrounding a treacherous hurricane, Boyden’s second novel is an adroit, compulsively readable study of a city and the shared humanity that unites its diverse inhabitants.”
–People, four out of four stars

“Once in a great while, a novel comes along that makes you sit up and look around at your world and see it anew, in all its richness and complexity, as if you had just arrived there from a great distance. Amanda Boyden's second novel, Babylon Rolling, does that for New Orleans…. She surprises at every turn, seizing upon the way violence -- and joy -- can erupt in a moment. Babylon Rolling is many books in one -- a brilliant, nuanced portrait of pre-Katrina New Orleans; a passionate defense of the city; a clear-eyed critique of the problems that remain. Gracefully weaving together strands of race relations, food, music and Mardi Gras (‘Babylon rolls at 5:45, the paper said, Chaos at 6’), Boyden shoots right to the heart of a fabulous, flawed city. Her aim is true. In Babylon Rolling, as in life, New Orleanians stand and fall together, rescue one another and, in doing so, themselves.”
–Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“Complex and compelling.... Boyden has so fully and generously imagined Orchid Street and its inhabitants. Her writing acknowledges the depth of race and class divisions... but she’s also aware of the ways people break out of their assigned roles.... From the stutter steps her characters take toward and away from one another, Boyden creates an engrossing dance.... The five story lines build into a terrifically vivid portrait of a city and its people.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Few contemporary novels are, at their root, as compelling about the relationship between a city and the people who live there. Boyden’s Babylon Rolling is a love letter, sometimes sad, sometimes angry, sometimes beautiful, between New Orleans and five people who live on one of its streets.” –The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“It is possible that New Orleans is the perfect setting for the post-9/11 American novel…. Like the characters in the gorgeous and tactile Babylon Rolling, our survival hinges on our ability to cope with the lack of a universal culture and common body politic, the truth that natural disasters and random violence are a fact of life.” –Mother Jones

“Boyden's novel conveys the patchwork of New Orleans' Uptown neighborhoods–very much evident in Riverbend, where working-class whites and blacks live alongside old-line socialites and immigrant professionals. . . . Episodic but not predictable, it is a book that beckons to be read for just a few more pages.” –Mobile Press-Register

“Threats of natural disaster bracket this novel of New Orleans, which opens just prior to Hurricane Ivan in September 2004 and ends with the ominous approach of Katrina the following summer. In the intervening year, certain residents of the Uptown district weather personal tragedies rivaling the impact of killer storms. Orchid Street, diverse by any standard, includes two African American families, upstanding senior citizens Roy and Cerise Brown and the more struggling Harrises, as well as a young family of well-meaning but clueless whites recently arrived from Minnesota, a half-mad gentlewoman of the old school, and the exotic, intellectual Gupta clan. Neighborhood bar Tokyo Rose serves all as both haven from and catalyst of neighborhood disturbances. As lives and cultures overlap, the author of Pretty Little Dirty melds an enticing sense of place and a kaleidoscope of distinctive voices into a cautionary tale of ambition, desire, and conflict.”
–Library Journal

"Boyden has a chameleon-like ability to inhabit any persona, of any race or age, so fully and seamlessly it's hard to remember that these people are invented rather than real. Pre-Katrina New Orleans leaps to life on every page, a beautiful, seamy, fragile city on the brink of chaos and ruin. Babylon Rolling is a heart-breaking and riveting novel."
--Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man, winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award

"Boyden invoked an array of New Orleans voices on Uptown's Orchid Street . . . an American Babylon that batters and woos with delights and disasters . . . The book's nuanced story of people who 'choose to live . . . inside the big lasso of river' reveals a side of the Crescent City not often seen in fiction."
–Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375425330
• ISBN-13: 978-0375425332
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,433,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We love a place that cannot be saved by levees.", August 5, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Babylon Rolling: A Novel (Hardcover)

It is no mean feat for a fiction writer to own characters of varied cultural identities, each adding personal nuance to a helter-skelter patchwork of personalities that make up Orchid Street in New Orleans, from a transplanted Minneapolis family to new East Indian neighbors to the mixture of black and white families that make up an eclectic, low-key neighborhood, including a local bar, the Tokyo Rose. Boyden frames her cast with a deft touch, defining subtle differences and similarities as they interact, beginning in the summer of 2004, through the threat of Hurricane Ivan, the Katrina disaster just over the horizon for these unsuspecting folks. Orchid Street is pure New Orleans, a city of divergent tastes and interests with a big heart and a penchant for celebration. Here the slightly more affluent reside near the less fortunate, sidewalk barbeques drawing people from their homes, the summer heat, ice-cold beer and the easy camaraderie of life old and new, always in transition. Everybody has their problems; life is tough, but they look out for one another when the occasion calls for it.

With a tough-talking, street wise Richard Wright style of narrative, Boyden takes no prisoners, her protagonists explicitly defined: Ed and Ariel, he a Buddhist househusband, she the general manager of a French Quarter hotel, La Belle Nouvelle, catering to a clientele of edgy rappers and their outrageous entourages; the elderly neighborhood fixtures, Roy and Cerise Brown, a couple of great generosity and kindness, Roy often setting up his barbeque for the neighbors, Cerise preparing her spicy fare; Philomenia (Prancie) Beauregard de Bruges and her cancer-riddled husband, Joe, she with a plan to alter the serenity of Orchid Street with an excessive bounty of food, he languishing in a dark bedroom awaiting the end; the Gupta's, the newest folks on the block, Indira in her brilliant saris, the mild-mannered Ganesh taking everything, including Ivan, in stride; Sharon Harris and her excitable brood, a gaggle of grandbabies overflowing the ramshackle dwelling; and Sharon's son, Daniel, street name Fearius, a young man with gangsta ambitions, running drugs and desperately building up street cred, recently graduated from box cutter to gun.

From the opening chapter, when we meet the misguided Fearius, it is clear that trouble is brewing, that each home on Orchid Street hides its own problems and heartaches; all of these people will interact until a bloody resolution. What will be the catalyst and who will be left standing, lives still intact? Boyden fully inhabits these characters, moving seamlessly from one to another, always aware of the family challenges and the cultural pressures that cause a young man with no future to exceed the boundaries of reason. Small dramas inform the plot, from marital infidelity to the unbalanced, slow-burning rage of a disturbed woman, good intentions overriding the most egregious behavior of a few. A freak accident, the threat of a hurricane and various family disturbances build an atmosphere of inevitability to this taut tale, but the author remains firmly in control, her multi-faceted, all-too-human characters familiar and accessible, pre-Katrina. The future devastation of Katrina looms over Orchid Street, a microcosm of this quintessential American city. A great spirit drives this place, indomitable in the face of nature's destruction, and of man's. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too picky, I guess, August 24, 2008

By 

Evangeline Nola - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Babylon Rolling: A Novel (Hardcover)

I bought it because I'm a New Orleans native and because it was well received here at Amazon. But as lovely as some of the prose could be, there was just something off key with the story, with its tone, and especially with the dialogue and monologues. At times, I felt that the source material was right out of the HBO series 'The Wire', down to the idea that a black kid out of juvey with drug lord aspirations thinks in terms of chess moves or calls his drugs "the product." Baltimore maybe. New Orleans no way. There is an insane upper crust white woman who keeps a journal filled with sarcastic misobservations of her neighbors a la 'Notes on a Scandal.' These things jar the narrative for me. But what I find most peculiar is the absence of certain standard colloquialisms, particularly those used in the black community and across all wards, that are absolutely missing in this book which is supposed to be a character study of New Orleans. There are certain sayings and expressions a New Orleanian would know without necessarily having much to do with the black community, things a writer with an interested ear would pick up online at the grocery. They are not in the novel at all. How is this possible? On the other hand, the novel consistently uses a vernacular that is not at all particular to New Orleans. It's distracting. [Ok, hol' on an listen up: I been livbin' in New Orleans my hol' life an I ain' neber heard no one talkin' 'bout how they "best do this" or they "best done that", especially no black folks.] The author is a former trapeze artist, a career which has been used as an analogy for her writing gifts. But I think it is also an appropriate analogy for her writing weaknesses: she is flying so high above her subject that she is slightly out of earshot and slightly out of view of the real city. Another problem I have is the author's uneven tone--is it satire, is it irony? I don't know. Out of the entire cast, I felt empathy for only one character and frankly none for the city at all. I guess all the tragedy I've personally witnessed and continue to witness since Katrina makes me sensitive about a writer approaching New Orleans without a truly vested emotional commitment to it. I don't know. I just didn't feel it here. Still, this is a book that can be finished in a day or two; it is interesting and there are patches of beautiful writing throughout, so for a light read I would recommend it. But only for a light read.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Powerful and Heartbreaking Novel, August 14, 2008

By 

Julian Z (Central Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Babylon Rolling: A Novel (Hardcover)

I can think of perhaps five other books that so consumed my days and then kept me up at night by lamplight. And I can think of no other novel that so beautifully renders in the reader's imagination the city of New Orleans.

Amanda Boyden accomplishes no easy feat in this novel. The novel is told in five distinct voices, and I found myself rooting for and then against and then, once again, for the five protagonists at various points in the story. The characters are incredibly complex. Like anybody else, they are flawed, but they are not without their redemptive merits. And, as Hurricane Katrina gathers force in the Gulf and the book comes to a heartbreaking climax--well, I won't ruin the ending, but I will say that this book will stick with you long after you've put it down (and, if you're reading experience was anything like mine, you'll finish the book about two days after you first picked it up).

My highest possible recommendation.