City of Refuge: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: smashed wood, hurricane fence, New Orleans, City of Refuge, Tom Piazza (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families--one black and one white--confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.

SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans' music and culture have been Craig's passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there.

When the news comes of a gathering hurricane--named Katrina--the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town.

But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning--and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered--first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there.

Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece--a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.

Editorial Reviews

"Piazza knows New Orleans, its flavors and aromas, music and magic, pragmatism and joie de vivre. He also understands the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. . . . In unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. By following his characters into the Katrina Diaspora and back again, Piazza tells a towering tale of self, family, and place, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself." --Booklist (Starred Review)

"City of Refuge is an old-fashioned, realistic novel of New Orleans, with all the sensuousness, all the flash-point tumult, the easy-yet-hard-won virtue of the city, as well all the forthrightness, the deftness and affirming intensity of the form. People ask me when will Katrina begin to inform our art, when will imagination become essential to tell what the raw facts can't. Well, here's an answer: now. City of Refuge speaks eloquently into that silence." --Richard Ford

"To read City of Refuge is to realize that this is what fiction is for: to take us to places the cameras can't go. The novel's characters--and what happens to them--are unforgettable, and so is the portrait of New Orleans, the city Tom Piazza clearly loves with all his large, generous heart." --Richard Russo

"City of Refuge is a tremendously moving book. While reading it you will have to fight the urge to skip ahead to see what happened, and to whom. This is true even though we all know on a general level 'what happened' during Hurricane Katrina; Piazza takes what we know to a deeper, more human level. There are books that give back to art and there are books that give back to life--this book is among the latter." --Mary Gaitskill

"Whatever Tom Piazza writes is touched with magic. As a former longtime New Orleans resident, I was astounded at how brilliantly Piazza captured (in vivid detail) the nuances of his City of Refuge. Although this is ostensibly a Katrina novel, Piazza transcends genre or pigeonholing in what is one of the most deeply humanistic portraits of people coping with cataclysm since The Grapes of Wrath." – Douglas Brinkley

"City of Refuge is a stunning, irresistibly absorbing novel. A dramatic tale about the ravaging impact of Hurricane Katrina, it is also an ode to the ineradicable beauties of a beloved American city and the resilience of its residents." --Joanna Scott

"Tom Piazza's City of Refuge is a great read--sweeping and intimate, elegiac and angry, serving as lyrical witness to the destruction and recovery of a great city." --Jess Walter

"Like the city he writes about, Tom Piazza's new book is beautiful, harrowing, compassionate, and complex. City of Refuge does what all great American novels must do: it gives voice to the voiceless and remembers the stories the politicians want us to forget. The future of American fiction--and perhaps America--depends on novelists who can tell us stories like this." --Dean Bakopoulos

The Story Behind City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza

City of Refuge pretty much insisted on being written. I didn’t sit down one day and think, "How can I write a novel about Hurricane Katrina?" In some ways, it was the last thing I wanted to do.

Immediately after Katrina, in September 2005, while my partner Mary and I were evacuated to Missouri from our home in New Orleans, I began writing my short book Why New Orleans Matters. It was completed in five weeks, and HarperCollins published it that November. After it was published, I found that I had turned into a kind of spokesman for New Orleans’ recovery; I crisscrossed the country for months, speaking at colleges, doing television and radio interviews, all of that. I was proud to do it, and I considered it a privilege.

But by the spring of 2006 I was a little burned out on speaking about New Orleans. I needed time to process my own emotional trauma from the storm. Sometime that March, Sweet Briar College in Virginia invited me to visit and do a fiction workshop and a public talk on New Orleans. Along with that engagement came a gift: two weeks’ residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--time to mend, reflect, and think about what life might look like after this disaster. Friends had died, friends had lost everything, Mary’s house had been flooded, the house I rented had been damaged and was unlivable for six months. There was a lot to think about, a lot to reckon with.

Then something strange happened. On my way to Virginia, the characters in City of Refuge began appearing in my mind with an almost hallucinatory immediacy. I could see them--Lucy, SJ, Craig and Annie and Alice, Wesley--with an eerie clarity. SJ, a carpenter in the Lower Ninth Ward, working on his house on a hot August afternoon, Craig, a Midwestern transplant to New Orleans, taking his seven year-old daughter Annie to a street parade, SJ’s sister Lucy waking up at an evacuee camp in Missouri and not knowing where she was….. I could see them all, hear them all, and everything I was seeing and hearing felt urgent and important.

In nine days at Virginia Center I wrote ten thousand words about these characters, as well as a complete synopsis of what happened to them, starting about a week before Katrina and ending right around Mardi Gras six months later. I have never had a writing experience like that, and I won’t count on having another one like it anytime soon. It was like having a high fever.

That fever lasted for the nearly two years it took me to write City of Refuge. I wrote it at my home in New Orleans--damaged, resilient, depressed, inspiring, unbearably hot New Orleans--as well as at arts colonies like Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Virginia Center, and various other places in Virginia, Missouri, and Cape Cod. I did a lot of driving while I was writing this book. In the course of that time, my landlord decided to sell the house where I had been living (I ended up buying it myself three months into the writing of the novel, a process I’d just as soon never go through again), I broke my ankle and spent two months on crutches, several friends in New Orleans committed suicide, and one of my oldest and dearest friends died just as I finished the first draft.

Through all of this, these characters kept insisting on coming to the page; they forced me to listen to what they had to say, and to feel what they were feeling. Nothing has ever felt so important to me. Craig and Alice, their friends Bobby and Jen, SJ and Lucy and Wesley and SJ’s cousin Aaron and his wife Dot, and Dot’s cousin Leeshawn who brings SJ back to life after all he went through….. these characters became as real to me as anyone I have ever known in life. I hope they become just as real for anyone who reads City of Refuge.

What happened in New Orleans, and for all the New Orleans people scattered around the country because of the disaster, is, on one level, particular to New Orleans. But on another level it is an anthology of universal experience--exile, family separation and reunion, the loss and reclaiming of home, the yearning for community, the need for love. The disaster affected not just New Orleanians but the entire nation, and will continue to do so for a long time. If my book helps people understand, empathize, and share some of that experience as if it were their own, then I will feel that I have done something good with my work.

From Publishers Weekly

A passionate ode to the Big Easy's cracked bowl, the latest from Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters) offers two alternating perspectives on Katrina and its aftermath. For Craig Donaldson—a white Michigan transplant who edits local culture organ Gumbo, who has a tidy house near Tulane University and whose two-child marriage appears headed for divorce—Katrina becomes a pressure valve for his own stifled emotions, as Craig rants about the despicable lies of George Bush, the man-made nature of the Katrina disaster, and his own marriage. Much more effective are sections that focus on SJ, a black Vietnam vet and widower from the Lower Ninth Ward, who is taking care of his invalid sister, Lucy, as the hurricane strikes. Craig's and SJ's approaches to evacuation couldn't differ more, and while their competing narratives occasionally illustrate the city's race and class divide a little too schematically, the point that thousands were left to rot is brought home with kinetic intensity. In stark contrast to Craig's bluster—and to some of the stereotypes handed to Lucy's character—SJ's methodical approach to the disaster and his ability to rebound from devastating loss speak volumes. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (August 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061238619
• ISBN-13: 978-0061238611
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 1.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #525,345 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful and Nicely Written, July 19, 2008

By	David Ross "Cook, Chemist, Nurse" (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

City of Refuge is a story of two families as they seek refuge from Hurricane Katrina. The main characters are SJ a black Vietnam Veteran, widower and carpenter living in the lower 9th Ward and Craig Donaldson a white jazz writer, editor and transplant to New Orleans. City of Refuge describes the contrasting experiences of the families of the protagonists as their lives are irreversibly disrupted by Hurricane Katrina.

The experiences of SJ's family are the more gripping and better realized. Inherently this is because SJ's whole family's history and being is interwoven with his family's life in the lower lower 9th , where: "You had a place, a role to fill, a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, a community." Both emotionally and physically they have much more to lose. In contrast the Donaldson are of the class and mindset where: "The badge of honor is being able to ride above the discomfort, arranging things so that you and your family are not sweating it out in the grease pit with everyone else." Inherently you feel the smallness of the Donaldson's problems compared to SJs making his families troubles all the more poignant. Overall this is a thoughtful examination of class, race, family and community in New Orleans through the lens of the Katrina experience.

About the Author: Award winning author Tom Piazza is himself a New Orleans resident and jazz writer; he was displaced by Katrina, eventually returning to the city and writing the non fiction work Why New Orleans Matters which discusses the cultural importance of restoring New Orleans. This book effectively makes the same argument in fictional though semi-autobiographic form.

His previous fiction works are the novel My Cold War and the short-story collection Blues and Trouble which won the James Michener Award for Fiction. Piazza has also written two listeners guides to jazz music and a compilation of jazz album liner notes. In addition Piazza is a regular writer of liner notes for jazz and rock CDs.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I must be missing something, August 30, 2008

By	Marilyn Dalrymple "MaLing" (Lancaster, CA United States) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

After reading the other reviews, which are mostly positive, I feel I must be missing something. Piazza has won numerous awards for his writing - he is an accomplished author, no doubt. And most who have read it seem impressed by City of Refuge.

However, I had to force myself to finish this novel. The story is told to the reader and that is what leaves me cold and uninvolved. I couldn't get into the characters heads, no matter how hard I tried. Instead of being with the characters and being able to get inside their skin, I was a bystander watching from afar.

Portions of the writing are lyrical and well done, but most of the novel is like reading a newspaper report. The book left me cold. I'm sorry to say this because I understand the devastation of Katrina, and I can only imagine the difficulties those who lived in the destroyed area had to contend with.

There is such opportunity for a strong, moving and epic-like story to be told that it seems it would be difficult to miss it. But, unfortunately, this novel does miss the opportunity in my mind. But then, I'm only one person.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big Easy's Spirit Humanized, July 23, 2008

By	K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

The famous spirit of New Orleans is encapsulated in this novel by two families whose lives are transformed by the aftermath of Katrina. Much has been written about the devastation, but only someone who has experienced it first-hand could provide the humananity that Tom Piazza provides through two families. By chosing not to focus on the more sensational grusomeness of the situation, Piazza instead takes a more unconventional route and populates his story with characters deciding what to do when they realize their way of life has been changed forever. The choices they make and the reasons for doing so bring the tragedy of New Orleans to vivid reality for readers who have not known that city either before or after the fact. I would imagine that people who live there will find themselves in these characters, and will applaud Piazza's perception and generosity of spirit. Highly recommended.