Rhett Butler's People (Mass Market Paperback)

by Donald McCaig (Author)
Key Phrases: trunk master, sporting house, Rhett Butler, Andrew Ravanel, John Haynes (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Margaret Mitchell's story of Scarlett O'Hara's and Rhett Butler's beguiling, twisted love for each other, set against the gruesome background of a nation torn apart by war, is by all accounts epic--so much so that it feels untouchable. Yet McCaig's take on what many would consider a sacred cow of 20th-century American literature is a worthy suitor for Mitchell's many ardent fans, for reasons that may not be altogether obvious. It would be easy to look at Gone With the Wind and Rhett Butler’s People side by side and catalog what is accurate and what isn't and tally up the score. In doing so, however, the fan is apt to miss out on the best part of this whole book: Rhett Butler himself. McCaig's Rhett is thoroughly modern, both a product of his Charleston plantation and an emphatic rejection of it. He is filled with romance and ingenuity, grit and wit, and a toughness matched only by a sense of humility that evokes so gracefully the hardship and heartbreak of a society falling apart. It's not hard to love Rhett in his weakness for Scarlett's love, but it is entirely amazing to love him as he rescues Belle Watling, mentors her bright young son Tazewell, adores his sister Rosemary, dotes on dear Bonnie Blue, and defends his best friend Tunis Bonneau to the very end.

To pluck a character from a beloved book and recalibrate the story's point-of-view isn't an easy thing to do. Ultimately, the new must ring true with the old, and this is where Rhett Butler’s People succeeds beyond measure. In the spirit of Mitchell's masterpiece, McCaig never questions that love--of family, lover, land, or country--is the tie that binds these characters to life, for better or worse. --Anne Bartholomew

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--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Was it strictly necessary to our understanding of Gone With the Wind's dashing hero to flesh out his backstory, replay famous GWTW scenes from his perspective, and crank the plot past the original's astringent denouement? Perhaps not, but it's still a fun ride. In this authorized reimagining, Rhett, disowned son of a cruel South Carolina planter, is still a jauntily worldwise charmer, roguish but kind; Scarlett is still feisty, manipulative and neurotic; and the air of besieged decorum is slightly racier. (Rhett: "My dear, you have jam at the corner of your mouth." Scarlett: "Lick it off.") But it says much about the author's sure feel for Margaret Mitchell's magnetic protagonists that they still beguile us. McCaig (Jacob's Ladder) broadens the canvas, giving Rhett new dueling and blockade-running adventures and adding intriguing characters like Confederate cavalier-turned-Klansman Andrew Ravanel, a rancid version of Ashley Wilkes who romances Rhett's sister Rosemary. He paints a richer, darker panorama of a Civil War-era South where poor whites seethe with resentment and slavery and racism are brutal facts of life that an instinctive gentleman like Rhett can work around but not openly challenge. McCaig thus imparts a Faulknerian tone to the saga that sharpens Mitchell's critique of Southern nostalgia without losing the epic sweep and romantic pathos. The result is an engrossing update of GWTW that fans of the original will definitely give a damn about.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312945787
• ISBN-13: 978-0312945787
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.1 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (255 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #508,310 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You Can't Go Home To Tara, November 16, 2007

By	rctnyc (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rhett Butler's People (Hardcover)

No novel will ever be an adequate sequel to "Gone With The Wind," and no writer will ever "complete" Mitchell's story. "Gone With The Wind" is an American epic, the tale of the fall of a doomed civilization and the dissolution and reunification of the Union. Against that backdrop, Mitchell portrayed a passionate, tragic romance between two characters with whom readers themselves fall in love. No author will ever recapture the magic of the original, whether in a prequel, sequel, or "other story," because the novel is complete "as is." Like any work of fiction, the work ends where it ends. In the case of GWTW, the reader is left longing for answers, just as Scarlett longed for Ashley, Rhett longed for Scarlett, and, at the novel's conclusion, Scarlett schemes to win Rhett back.

Mitchell wrote with conviction and zeal, because the story was one that she knew well -- she'd grown up among people who had lived through and fought in the Civil War and then endured the humiliation and struggles of the Reconstruction period. Basically (the literary critics are going to kill me for this), GWTW is the American "War and Peace," and Scarlett O'Hara is our Natasha. We will never know what happens to Rhett and Scarlett, however, because Mitchell, a consummate storyteller, didn't choose tell us.

That said -- I am enjoying "Rhett Butler's People," because it's not a bad read and tells a story of its own. Those reviewers who are proclaiming that the book is "awful" are, I think, merely pining for the original. I recommend "Rhett Butler's People" to anyone who is not so attached to Mitchell's novel and characters that he or she can't put aside GWTW and take McCaig's book on its own terms. If you view McCaig, not as trying to complete GWTW, but rather as imagining -- as any author does -- what Rhett Butler's history might have been, this is an engaging novel with which to while away a winter's afternoon.

66 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Correcting Margaret Mitchell, December 30, 2007

By	Mrs. Olsen (Folgers, SE) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rhett Butler's People (Hardcover)

I picked up this book with an open mind. I enjoy fanfiction and new takes on old favorites and never believe that any work is sacrosanct. GWTW from Rhett Butler's POV sounded fascinating, but that's not what this book is. It's not a retelling. It's not a sequel. It's not even--as I first thought--an attempt to whitewash the character of Rhett Butler. It is a correction of the flaws the author perceives to exist in the original.

Many other reviews mention the inconsistencies between this book and GWTW (to which this book must and should be compared), and it's important to consider these not just because it's a kind of cheating not to work within the framework of the source novel, but to consider why McCaig made the changes he did. For example, there is no mention of Scarlett's miscarriage. Why? Because it doesn't fit McCaig's image of Rhett Butler. Then McCaig's Rhett Butler is simply not Rhett Butler.

The Rhett Butler McCaig creates bears almost no resemblance to Mitchell's complex, cynical, wry observer. McCaig's Rhett is morose to the point of clinical depression and very nearly the embodiment of all manly virtues. He is friend to every man, black or white. This puts his character in conflict with the very foundation of the Confederacy. Does he believe in it or doesn't he? That might have been an interesting conflict to explore, but instead, McCaig simply leaves it there on the page, without explanation. Rhett loves and supports blacks on this page. On this page, he loves and supports the Confederacy. The end. McCaig expects you to accept Rhett as he tells you he is, rather than as he shows him.

This happens frequently as numerous characters refer to Rhett as a rakehell and a renegade, but this is never substantiated in the story itself. Just saying a character is a rakehell doesn't make him one when all you show him doing is mooning over the habits of loggerhead turtles, nobly supporting every helpless creature that crosses his path and having palpitations whenever Miss Scarlett smiles at him.

Yes, that's right. This Rhett is reduced to a lovesick schoolboy on first sight of Scarlett O'Hara and on every occasion thereafter. Gone are the sparkling scenes where he taunts and teases Scarlett, admiring her very worst qualities and loving her for them. Instead, the love scenes between this paragon of a Rhett and this confident, erudite and unrecognizable Scarlett are on the level of second-rate romantic bilgewater. ("Scarlett. Sunshine, hope and everything he ever wanted.")

Other scenes are referenced but skipped over and replaced with McCaig's inventions, again to facilitate his vision of Rhett. Instead of a scene where Rhett offers Scarlett a green silk hat from Paris to deliberately torment her false sense of propriety, knowing she will be torn between wanting to wear it and not wanting to expose herself by throwing off her widow's weeds, we get Rhett breathlessly offering Scarlett the yellow silk shawl she in turn makes into a sash for Ashley. Only this time, instead of the silk shawl being a minor symbol of Rhett's easy profligacy in a time of want and self-denial, McCaig constructs a ludicrously maudlin tale of the shawl having belonged to Rhett's adorable Bonnie-Blue-esque niece, who had been killed in the shelling of Charleston. Scarlett is somehow supposed to recognize what--in the original--Rhett obviously knew was a rather tacky and gaudy trifle--as the deepest offering of a devoted man's heart. When she fails to, she crushes the tenderest hopes of this noble creature.

There are occasions when he can't avoid retelling scenes from GWTW and that is frequently where he gets tangled up in the conflict between his Rhett and Mitchell's Rhett. A prime example is the flight from Atlanta, where he can't quite make the abandonment of Scarlett work for this lovesick, devoted, perfect Rhett, and so Rhett's motivation is lost in a murky jumble of the romantic uncertainties of a schoolboy. (She never really loved me. I might as well go to war.)

McCaig never comes close to matching Mitchell's voice, as perhaps he shouldn't. But since Mitchell's feminine story was written in a voice that was stringent and vigorous, it is odd to read this masculine story couched in overwrought, flowery prose ("The frosty Milkyway stretched across the heavens to the horizon where it drowned in the ruddy penumbra of guns.") I must also mention, as have others, the frequently disjointed quality of the writing. There are paragraphs made up of sentences that bear no relation to each other and conversations abruptly switch topics depending on what the author needs to have the characters say rather than the natural course of the conversation.

And this isn't even getting into the large sections of the book that are given over to characters that never appeared in GWTW. McCaig's own dear creations. In fact, a case could be made that McCaig sets up his Rosemary Butler as a new and improved Scarlett, giving her similar travails but a more womanly attitude and forebearance and awarding her the coveted prize in the end.

But the key problem in this tale of an alien Rhett and Scarlett isn't that McCaig is entitled to his interpretation. It's that McCaig had no taste for the original. He says as much in an interview in the New York Times, where he admits that he had never read GWTW when approached by St. Martin's to pen a "sequel." When he did finally read it, he pronounced everything but the Civil War bits as "Oh dear."

So then why write it at all? He admits to "four parts poverty" playing a role in his decision. But it's abundantly clear that he does not understand Mitchell's characters and what motivated them and with all the fundamental mistakes he makes, it is also clear that he does not care to. He is more interested in constructing his new, improved versions. It is impossible to read this book without feeling that this was his aim: to show how GWTW ought to have been written.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but ultimately disappointing, November 24, 2007

By	Virginia Stapleton (DYERSBURG, TN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rhett Butler's People (Hardcover)

I agree with the reviewer that said that this author was "damned if he did and damned if he didn't". How can you sucessfully write the sequel to a book that many of us have lived and breathed for years? I hated "Scarlett" so much I had forgotten already that it was also authorized by the Mitchell Estate. God Almighty! What were they thinking there? (However, I do love Alexandra Ripley's "Charleston" which I consider a very under-rated Southern Classic). I had thought Pat Conroy was going to write this new sequel. Would that he did!!

I don't think this author did a very good job with his characterization, particularly with Scarlett. It all seemed too alien and flat and not a continuation for the characters we all know and love. Because of this flatness and lack of continuity I really can't believe this author read "Gone with the Wind" more than once or twice. I guess I'm sexist but few male authors can write a women's true character and this author took huge artistic liscense with the sexuality of Scarlett and Melly. This just wasn't our Scarlett but it was a sexed up, male fantasy version of the Scarlett I had envisoned and that was very sad for me. This was a pre-Victorian Era and I just can't believe the woman of this era were as sexually awakened as this author writes.

However, I do disagree with the review that claimed the author besmirched Melly's honor and morality. Melly has to be somewhat human and subject to human fraility's of character and I do think that this was captured in this book in the few times that Melly was portrayed having human faults. We saw it with Ellen Robillard regarding Phillipe in GWTW and this author allowed Melanie to also be human. That was very insightful.

I am going to have to read this a second and then third time to make a definate decision and I know that is a sad review to submit!!! However, books, like other things, are subject to our moods and whims and especially to our expectations....and I do think this book warrants more attempts . I do know it lacks the overall richness of descritions and storyline that Margaret Mitchell gives us but it does give us many other details that suprisingly fit with the first book that I felt the book "Scarlett" fell short with. It aint a Pulitzer, folks, but it does give us a worthy background for Rhett and Belle and others.

I am upset that Mitchell's Estate authorized "Scarlett" because, to me, that totally discredits the reception and authenticity of this sequel especially since the storylines of either do not mesh with the other.

Final recommendation: Read it through to get it over with...then read it again (and again if necessary) and then make your decision.