On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon [Paperback]

Kaye Gibbons (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 1999

Sprawling in its scope but heartbreakingly exact in its depiction of a family torn apart, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is a magnificent novel in the great Southern tradition. In the year 1900--on the afternoon she suspects might be the last of her long, eventful life--Emma Garnet Tate Lowell sets down on paper what came before, determined to make an honest account of it. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grew up determined to escape the domination of her bullying, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, and ultimately seceded from his control to marry Quincy Lowell, a surgeon and member of the distinguished Boston family. But then came the Civil War. Working alongside Quincy, assisting him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she witnessed scenes that would be engraved forever in her memory. And, before beginning the long journey of her own reconstruction, she must face the shame of her relationship to her "servants" and learn the terrible secret that shaped her father's life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Everyone who read Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain should consider reading Kaye Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, the poetically charged fictional reminiscences of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, child of Virginia's Seven Oaks plantation, from 1842-1900. For one thing, it was Frazier's already-published friend Gibbons who, with his wife's connivance, pried Cold Mountain from his grip and got it into publishers' hands.

But beyond their Civil War settings--a first for Gibbons, who's noted for 20th-century tales--the two books share resonant Southern literary accents, characters with similarly obstinate responses to enormous grief, and a shivery sense of history's stark shadow falling across everyday events. Oprah Winfrey twice recommended Gibbons's fiction (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), and Walker Percy compared her to Faulkner. Probably Oprah liked Gibbons's heroines for their plucky refusal to buckle under oppression--a trait shared by Gibbons herself, who triumphed over the manic-depression that drove her mother to suicide.

Our heroine, Emma, quakes under the tyranny of her plantation daddy, Samuel P. Tate, who slits the throat of a slave who talks back to him and just might do the same to his half-dozen children. There is no enormity of which he is incapable, this bellowing Simon Legree with an autodidact's education and a self-made man's bottomless urge to rise above his raising. He is, as he might have thunderingly put it, "a pluperfect son of Satan." Only Clarice, the matriarchal slave and true ruler of the household, can fight Samuel Tate to a verbal draw and prevent slave uprisings on the eve of war. Clarice helps save Emma, as does her impeccable swain Dr. Quincy Lowell, who sweeps in like a cool Boston breeze to dispel the dismal tidewater miasma.

The war, alas, brings a tsunami of blood, forcing Dr. Lowell to make Emma a de facto battlefield surgeon--an occasion he recognizes by fashioning a bit of commemorative jewelry for her from a dead man's silver filling and inscribing the date with a finger-amputation tool. One aspect of Gibbons's Frazieresque orgy of historical research is an authentic feel for the grotesqueries of the period. She can be amusing, too: the "aggressively plain in the face" Miss McKimmon--a fanged Raleigh socialite who's mean to Emma--is said to have arrived at a party and "effused through the front door and into the arms of everyone simultaneously." On the audiocassette version of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, you can hear the proper way to pronounce "effused" for maximum satirical violence.

One craves for Emma's hubby and daddy to swap five percent of each others' respectively perfect and perfectly awful souls--the book is not big on startling character revelations. What makes it work, despite its lack of moral shading and narrative guile, is the grace and rumbling life of the narrator's language. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, which has its sometimes anachronistically enlightened head in the New South and its feet firmly planted in the past, deserves a place next to Russell Banks's John Brown novel Cloudsplitter. At points, it reads like a smarter, nonracist Gone with the Wind, only less windy. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A plea for racial tolerance is the subtext of Gibbons's estimable new novel, her first foray into historical fiction. Like her previous books (Ellen Foster, 1997, etc.), it is set in the South, but this one takes place during the Civil War era. Now 70 and near death, Emma Garnet Tate begins her account by recalling her youth as a bookish, observant 12-year-old in 1842, living on a Virginia plantation in a highly dysfunctional family dominated by her foulmouthed father, a veritable monster of parental tyranny and racial prejudice. Samuel Tate abuses his wife and six children but he also studies the classics and buys paintings by old masters. Emma's long-suffering mother, of genteel background and gentle ways, is angelic and forgiving; her five siblings' lives are ruined by her father's cruelty; and all are discreetly cared for by Clarice, the clever, formidable black woman who is the only person Samuel Tate respects. (Clarice knows Samuel's humble origins and the dark secret that haunts him, which readers learn only at the end of the book.) Gibbons authentically reproduces the vocabulary and customs of the time: Emma's father says "nigger" while more refined people say Negroes. "Nobody said the word slave. It was servant," Emma observes. At 17, Emma marries one of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon, and spends the war years laboring beside him in a Raleigh hospital. Through graphic scenes of the maimed and dying, Gibbons conveys the horror and futility of battle, expressing her heroine's abolitionist sympathies as Emma tends mangled bodies and damaged souls. By the middle of the book, however, Emma's narration and the portrayal of Clarice as a wise and forbearing earthmother lack emotional resonance. Emma, in fact, is far more interesting as a rebellious child than as a stoic grown woman. One finishes the novel admiring Emma and Clarice but missing the compelling narrative voice that might have made their story truly moving.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First Printing edition (May 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380732149
• ISBN-13: 978-0380732142
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,190,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, Kaye Gibbons at her finest prose and most tragic, August 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Hardcover)

This, Gibbon's latest work, is not her best, or perhaps a better way of saying it would be, her most literary, but it shows a side of this Southern author that was hiding in most of her earlier works. I've read the book several times, and though I am a male, I am a Southerner, and the book gives my shivers every time. It is the most beautifully tragic book I have ever read. (Shakespeare wrote plays, not books.) Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is, like most of Gibbons' main characters, strong, insightful, but none of the others have endured as much hardship as she has. The prose is, as usual, pitch-perfect, and though the characters are not greatly subtle in a post-modern way (to which we have perhaps become *too* accustomed), they are classic morality studies in themselves. This one blows GONE WITH THE WIND out of the water for Southern Romances. Kaye Gibbons is a consumate storyteller, and ON THE OCCASION OF MY LAST AFTERNOON is a stunning book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for a book group, October 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Paperback)

If you thought Cold Mountain was a good story, you'll like On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon for different reasons. Whereas Mountain was a love story, Occasion is one woman's story. Easy read, believable, entertaining. A good choice for a book group--mine gave it a thumb's up.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling style despite glaring historical inaccuracies, August 6, 1999

By 

K. Sterling "freelance writer" (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Paperback)

Kaye Gibbons has a very breezy, readable style, and she has managed to capture very well the phrasing used in writings of the ante- and post-bellum period. I only wish her research had been done more carefully. As a long-time Virginia resident, I can safely say that her sense of the geography of this state is confused at best and downright wrong at its worst. She is also incorrect when she tells of wounded soldiers being transported from Gettysburg and Antietam all the way to Raleigh so that they can undergo surgery at the hands of the main character's husband. No soldier needing surgery would ever have made it such a great distance, and the railroads were in such a dismal state that the Confederacy could not have transported desperately wounded men that far, even if it had had a mind to. Wounded men were generally treated in farmhouses and churches and barns nearest the battlefield. However, her portrayal of hospital conditions is accurate, and her knowledge of medicine is impressive. Her characters, although interesting, are a little two-dimensional -- either tolerant and good and wise, or abusive and narrow-minded. No one is depicted with the usual beauties and warts we generally find in humans. It is a testament to the strength of Gibbons' style that I enjoyed reading the book despite these glaring problems.