Customer Reviews

Babylon Rolling: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Having been such a big fan of Boyden's previous work, Pretty Little Dirty, I was somewhat disappointed by this. The story takes place in New Orleans and spans the time period from right before Hurricane Ivan until a few months before Katrina. Boyden introduces several narrators who all live on Orchid Street. Though few are acquainted at the beginning, their lives will intertwine in unexpected ways. Ed & Ariel are a married couple who moved from Minnesota because Ariel was hired to run a hotel. Next door lives the Ganesh family from India. On the other side of them are Joe and Philomenia, who likes to call herself Prancie. Prancie is not a big fan of the other side of the street, but spends lots of time observing their goings on. Over there live Roy and Cerise, African Americans in their 60's who have been residents of Orchid street for many years. Next door to them are the Harrises, whose young sons are involved in the sale of illegal substances and whose daughters all have babies. On the other side of them a house has been converted to a bar called the Tokyo Rose, which plays a pivotal role in the lives of several of these folks.
Ed, Ariel, Prancie, Cerise and Daniel "Fearius" Harris are our narrators, to whose inner monologue we are treated. Boyden gives each narrator a distinct voice, so we are able to understand who it is we are listening to, but this is sometimes disconcerting, especially in the case of Fearius. I can deal with a regional dialect when it's limited to the dialogue, but whole passages of the book pertaining to Fearius are nearly incomprehensible. In fact, I had to read this sentence from the first chapter several times: "Fearius like cold drinks better than malt liquor when they smokin the hydroponic, but Alphonse be inside Stumps for Colt 40s, and Fearius, his bankroll thin as a spliff now." I got more used to it, though, as the book went on.
Something interesting to note though, and I only noticed it myself as I read an article recently regarding this phenomenon, is that the white people and the young people are the most messed up, while the older black folks seem very wise and all-knowing. We really don't get much more than a glimpse of the East Indians, which was disappointing to me. It seems their function was to inject some mysticism and incense, then return to their home.
It sounds more like I'm complaining than praising this book, but I don't mean to. I really enjoyed reading it and was very much enthralled by the lives of these people. It must be difficult for a writer to get inside each of their heads like that, and Boyden pulls it off reasonably well.

Babylon Rolling is an amazing novel. It is a great portrait of New Orleans but that is not the only reason to buy the book.

Race relations, class differences and marital relationships are also essential elements of this book. The author delves into each of these and allows you to see the same events through the eyes of different people. She is able to give the point of view of a wide variety of people: an African American drug dealer, an environmentalist whose wife is considering an affair and a nosy neighbor whose husband is dying of cancer.

The story is also a portrait of pre-Katrina New Orleans. It is the days of Hurricane Ivan and the characters buckle down while attending "hurricane parties." The citizens of New Orleans have yet to see the amazing damage and pain a hurricane can cause.

The story is addictive and very difficult to put down.

Amanda Boyden's second novel, Babylon Rolling, presents a remarkable vision of New Orleans at the brink of disaster, a storm about to arrive that will tear out the heart of the city. While telling a remarkable story focused on a particular New Orleans neighborhood, Boyden wisely understands that any present day reader will see the city and the novel through the lens of Katrina. There she lets it lie, our awareness that a storm is coming that will end the city's life as it had existed before. In her portraits of New Orleans immigrants, natives, people of all races, this author displays an acute ability to render voice and make a drama that engages fully in that moment of the city before the disaster struck, when the lives of its citizens were already preoccupied by personal and private disasters. To list the people you meet here in this novel would do a disservice to their proper introductions in the novel, but the sum of it is that you will meet the whole of New Orleans in these pages, vibrantly represented. Few novels about this city have ever succeeded so well. Boyden shows remarkable growth from her astonishing, powerful first novel, Pretty Little Dirty. She has broadened her scope and displayed both her ambitions and her ability to achieve them. In this era of tentative publishing she has written a bold, daring novel that dares to incorporate a piece of all of us, and of our world, in its pages. The ending is stunning and cathartic, a vision of a city at the edge of a storm that will resonate in reader's minds for weeks afterward.

As a native Texan who spent the first eight years of my young, married life in New Orleans' Irish Channel, Boyden's Orchid Street was just as vivid, just as real as my own block of Pleasant Street. A young woman who had rarely ventured out of my sheltered, suburban life, I experienced New Orleans with a child's wide eyes. Nothing was lost on me. Now, as I read books and watch movies set in New Orleans, I have a skeptic's harsh view, "that's not how they'd do things there. . . that would never really happen. . . they don't really talk like that in New Orleans." But Babylon Rolling surprised me. The language is rich and true, the characters could easily be the same people I walked and talked with on my Pleasant Street porch, and the events that unfolded held me transfixed, because I cared about these fascinating people of Orchid Street. If you love New Orleans, you'll love Babylon Rolling, and like me, you won't be able to wait for Amanda Boyden's next creation.

I'm not sure if I read the same novel as another, less favorable, reviewer. Cinematically, I thought of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where critical mass is reached by seemingly small circumstances. I taught English to kids just like Fearius, and Boyden's representation of Nola's dialect [and the checkerboard neighborhoods] sounds dead-on to me. Sometimes a keen ear or eye comes from an author without a native bias; however, according to the Boyden's bio she has lived in Nola for over 15 years--including displacement and return from Katrina. Nevertheless, I am from a reading perspective that holds the text itself as the object of literary and aesthetic criticism, not the author. [For example, I wouldn't bias my reading of book by woman who writes from the point of view of a male narrator.] For me, as a person who lived in Nola and has just returned after a 5 year absence, Babylon Rolling not only shook me enough to see my own Irish Channel in the narrative, but it also reminded me how much the city's residents are intimately connected, even when we force ourselves to think otherwise. The paradox, of course, lay in the fact that this seems unique to Nola, but also, all urban neighborhoods have similar interconnectedness. Hence, though the book is ostensibly about Nola, it is, as well, a universal reminder to us all that our neighbors affect our lives.

The setting of this book is Orchid Street, New Orleans, over the course of almost a whole year, starting with the summer of 2004. Babylon Rolling focuses on the families that live on the block, and how their lives weave together with sometimes tragic and sometimes heartening consequences.

Ed and Ariel Flank and their two elementary-age children have moved from Minnesota. Ed is a typical liberal stay-at-home dad, Ariel works as the manager of a fancy French Quarter hotel. Across the street are Cerise and Roy Brown, an elderly black couple who love each other dearly. Next door to them is Sharon Harris, with her husband and children: several daughters with their babies, and two sons in serious trouble.

One day Michael Harris causes a catastrophic accident that brings them together in tragedy. Michael is hospitalized with a broken leg, and Cerise with seriously burned hands. Michael's brother Daniel, a.k.a. Fearius, takes over his drug route, and Cerise's bossy daughter takes over her mother's home. Neighbor Philomenia de Bruges, an upright and uptight matron, and her husband Joe, bedridden with cancer, connect with the new neighbors, the Guptas, through Philomenia's baking. Indira Gupta teaches at the university, her husband is an expert in reptiles and their children become friends with the Flank children.

The story is told from five points of view, or voices: Ariel, Philomenia, Cerise, Fearius, and Ed. The characters go through massive changes over the course of the year, due to their exposure to each other's cultures and lives. While some of the characters are unpleasant, or exhibit poor judgment, you will eventually get hooked by this gritty and realistic tale. My favorite characters are Cerise and Indira, and my favorite scene is where Cerise asks Indira about courses for seniors at the university, and Cerise makes up some possible course titles, like "Cooking the elderly" or "Penguins vs. septuagenarians: a study of ground speed."

Author Amanda Boyden was born in Minnesota, raised in Chicago and St. Louis, and now lives in New Orleans.

Armchair Interview says: A nice mix of messages about people and cultures.

From the very first pages of the prologue, Amanda Boyden's novel puts its lips to your ears and whispers the sweet, sweet nothings of New Orleans. Though the characters and perspectives shift from chapter to chapter, it is this first, plural voice that carries the reader through the novel, a Greek chorus shouting out both tragedy and triumph, drunk and joyous and weeping. In a world where this city's name is always echoed by the name of a storm, Boyden chooses a different chord to strike. Home. She chooses to paint the city, not with red circles on doors or with the faint grey lines of water marks, but with voices, voices of struggle and pain, hope and joy. She chooses to listen to its people, not at their moment of loudest despair, but in their times of unsung victory. She chooses to tell their stories, knowing that a city is not made up of one event but of multitudes. She chooses imperfections and failures, as it is the ugliest, rowdiest ducklings that make the most elegant of swans. In short, she chooses New Orleans. As it was, as it remains, in the blood and bone of her people, and as it will be again, Amanda Boyden chooses New Orleans. As do I. As should you.