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Kia Corthron

The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter: A Novel Hardcover – January 26, 2016

by Kia Corthron (Author)

53 ratings

4.5 on Goodreads

415 ratings

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Winner of the Center for Fiction's 2016 First Novel Prize

The hotly anticipated first novel by lauded playwright and The Wire TV writer Kia Corthron, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter sweeps American history from 1941 to the twenty-first century through the lives of four men--two white brothers from rural Alabama, and two black brothers from small-town Maryland--whose journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families.

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall--a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker--begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B.J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter--gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight--grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt.

The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron's ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America's past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences.

Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America's most recently recognized treasures.

Print length

800 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Seven Stories Press
Publication date

January 26, 2016
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.8 x 9.3 inches
ISBN-10

1609806573
ISBN-13

978-1609806576
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Kia Corthron
40
Hardcover
47 offers from $2.94

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Playwright Corthron's big, open-hearted debut novel has echoes of noted writers from the mid-20th century, which serves as its backdrop: the social conscience of Steinbeck, the epic sweep of Ferber, the narrative quirks of Dos Passos. Reading Corthron's novel adds racial context to the classic works of these earlier writers. The story follows two pairs of brothers: white Randall and B.J., who grow up in rural Alabama; and black Eliot and Dwight, who grow up in small-town Maryland. For all its size, this is a modestly plotted quartet of coming-of-age stories. It begins in 1941, with studious teenage Randall sharing his love of literature and his family history. B.J., who is five years his elder, is deaf, and Randall has become his de facto caretaker. Brilliant Eliot, who's all of six years old, and hard-working Dwight, who's 12, narrate the parallel storyline in counterpointed first-person chapters. Eliot's rackety prose plays nicely off Dwight's crisp, dutiful sentences. The story moves to the late '50s, with all four young men growing up in the thick of the Civil Rights movement. Randall's ambition and B.J.'s condition necessitate a separation, with B.J. moving to New York. Eliot goes to law school and Dwight gets a sensible job as a postman. The story then moves to 1983; Eliot and Randall cross paths, as readers suspect they must, and there are consequences for both. Corthron jumps to 2010 for a lengthy epilogue. This huge novel has the intimacy of memoir; Corthron's narrative voice makes it easy for readers to immerse themselves in the book, rarely coming up for air. (Jan.)

Review

"The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a stunning novel. Kia Corthron plunges us into generations of American history, moving with force and subtlety through the charged realities of race, gender and region. It is a novel of ideas and politics, of psychological complexity and of vibrant, kinetic language." —Margo Jefferson,Negroland

"Big, ambitious, challenging ... It tells the 20th-century history of the United States through the intersecting lives of two white brothers and two black brothers. It is, by turns, tender, brutal and redemptive." —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer

"There are whole chunks of writing here that are simply sublime, places in which one gets swept away by the way she subverts the rhythm of language to illuminate the familiar and allow it to be seen fresh. ... [Corthron] blindsides you. She sneaks up from behind. Sometimes, it is with moments of humor, but more often with moments of raw emotional power -- moments whose pathos feels hard-earned and true.... [The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] succeeds admirably in a novel's first and most difficult task: It makes you give a damn. It also does well by a novel's second task: It sends you away pondering what it has to say." —Leonard Fitts Jr., The New York Times Book Review

"Kia Corthron’s first novel is a stunning achievement by any measure—a riveting saga of two twentieth-century American families trapped inside the quotidian contradictions and compulsions of race, disability, and sexuality. The untidiness of history is conveyed through experiences, dreams, and inevitable eruptions of violence, yet also unexpected patterns of escape and possible orbits of justice." —Angela Y. Davis, UC Santa Cruz

"When I first read it, I was stunned. It's a haunting and devastating tale, leavened with humor and hope ... I believe [The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter] is the most important piece of writing about twentieth-century America since James Baldwin's Another Country." —Naomi Wallace, playwright

"Kia Corthron has written a magnificent, truly epic tale of the American Century told through the lives of two families, four brothers, three generations, big movements and small moments. It deserves a place among the great American novels precisely because it cuts to the very heart of America: the color line. In vivid, often breathtaking language, she reveals a changing world where love and sex and violence can rain down in the same cloudburst, and laughter and terror mingle easily, where the color line is not merely a barrier but a jump rope, a noose, a sign, and above all a tether that binds her characters and this country together." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)

"Playwright Corthron's big, open-hearted debut novel has echoes of noted writers from the mid-20th century, which serves as its backdrop: the social conscience of Steinbeck, the epic sweep of Ferber, the narrative quirks of Dos Passos. Reading Corthron's novel adds racial context to the classic works of these earlier writers ... This huge novel has the intimacy of memoir; Corthron's narrative voice makes it easy for readers to immerse themselves in the book, rarely coming up for air." —Publishers Weekly

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seven Stories Press (January 26, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 800 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609806573
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609806576
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.8 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,596,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,275 in Black & African American Historical Fiction (Books)
- #14,628 in Family Saga Fiction
- #65,708 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
53 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Mickey Yurkevicz

but I need a better reason to continue

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

Well... the positive reviews propelled me thru the first 100 pages, but I need a better reason to continue. These characters are unrecognizable to me. When I first encountered the pronoun "he" in reference to Randall, I reread from the beginning, since my brain had deemed it more plausible that Randall was an unfamiliar girl's name, an impression which failed to dim. By itself, this would be a high bar, since I do not believe that either gender can accurately portray the other, but the socio-psychological disconnect is complete. Randall is an eighth grade boy who cries a lot; or rather, "bawls" a lot: like in a locker room when his peers steal his clothes (which would be akin to suicide by way of torture); or for fear of losing THE DEBATE, which, as we all know, is a very prestigious and critically important endeavor, especially for eighth graders capable of speeches which would make any enlightened principal proud, and the unproud enlightened. Randall attempts suicide because he has been suspected of cheating (gasp, the shame of it), and being deprived of valedictorian honors (OK, ya well, that would do it). But when informed by all his cousins of the details regarding his brother's double rape origins, and dad's attempted murder (It's kind of a sharing family), has the clarity and calmness of mind to notice and reflect upon the collective mesmerization wrought by released fireflies before he runs away, as he is running away. Sound familiar? But wait! The revelatory ordeal is not over. On a pitch black night, he must find his way through the forest, to a spot never before visited (and I urge all you urban types to try this just once in your lives), in order to lie down, and to liken fireflies to falling stars (not in my universe), but if they were, at least an opportunity to make a wish, except that he doesn't have any, which proves that no bad metaphor goes unrewarded in a perfect world. Nothing to wish. It must be a perfect world. Weltschmertz unknown. Randall is a sensitive(?) and intelligent teenager for whom personal problems are pretty much like mosquito bites (except of course being valedictorian in WWII Alabama), & possible problems with the world-at-large roll off his back or are quickly set aright. Should we go fishing or go to the KKK rally? Well... we went fishing last week, so...

In the absence of relatable characters or insight, I'm left with a story with a lot of pages to tell it. Maybe I'm wrong and Randall will grow up and be the first person to get a sex change & marry a black man as different from daddy as can be. I'm thinking what I will get is something comparable to a chatty seatmate on long flight divulging their life history in circumstance. And then this happened and then that happened. In a mass media world which suffers from a surfeit of surface superficiality, I don't need a long book to experience it at length.

'

One person found this helpful

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Abatha A.B.

A Must-Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 20, 2016

Verified Purchase

The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a gorgeous book. Both complex and thrilling, it's is a sweeping epic that keeps you turning pages. I was hooked from the first line, “I got the world,” and couldn’t put it down as worlds unfurled. The reader begins to feel the author’s generosity in giving her characters, and us, wholly imagined universes glistening with sublime, surprising language; this is a writer in full command of her craft and imagination, with stunning compassion for all of the characters who populate this book — the writer achieves my favorite thing, taking an incomprehensible event and digging so deeply and skillfully, we simutaneously step outside ourselves and further inside, toward new understanding. The connections across time are brilliant and surprising, and the insights into brotherhood are etched to perfection. It’s a book I hope my children and grandchildren will be reading someday, to understand the 20th Century of their predecessors and our leap into the millennium, and because I have no doubt that this is a book for the ages. I put it down longing to linger in this world, grateful for the mysteries solved, and the greater mystery of life left awesomely intact. Quoting Kafa, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." This is one of those rare books, and catharsis lies waiting for you in its pages.

9 people found this helpful

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Laura Erickson

Beautifully drawn, complex characters

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 29, 2016

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If it's possible that a single book could be called the "Great American Novel," this is it. Beautifully drawn, complex characters, exquisitely well written, with a plot that pulls you in with the first sentence and doesn't let you go until the very last word. Two pairs of brothers, one black, one white, grow up in the South of the 30s and 40s. Kia Corthron's inventive writing draws us into each one's heart and mind, and although the plot is intricate and moves forward and backward in time, she keeps us along for the ride.

Uplifting and devastating, joyful and filled with sorrow and pain, this book was satisfying in so many ways, on so many levels. I love being immersed in a novel, but I honestly have never been so pulled in and fully absorbed by one like this before. I don't like writing negative reviews, so most of the books I review are ones I like or love. But I have never read a book I thought was genuinely perfect before The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter.

5 people found this helpful

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keen

This was a riveting story of race relations in the ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 30, 2017

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This was a riveting story of race relations in the U.S. South from just before WWII until the later part of the 20th Century. The main characters, brothers from two families, depict how ingrained racial hatred is in the South. Yet, despite this atmosphere some have the courage to stand against the community to try and effect justice. The author spends much time developing the reader's understanding of the four main characters before describing the horrific event that brings the two families "together." She then details the effect on the characters and their families. This historical novel demonstrates the probability that this racial animus still exists in many areas of the South. I would suggest this work rises to the level of Leon Uris' Trinity which detailed the reality of the divisions between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

One person found this helpful

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fgk

and bitterness hardens into hate. Forgiveness and resilience are sometimes in short supply

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2017

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Compelling novel about two sets of brothers set on a collision course in the age of Jim Crow. One set of brothers is black growing up in Maryland. The Caucasian brothers hail from Alabama. Making the relationships more complex is the fact that one of the black brothers is gay and one of the Caucasian brothers is deaf. Resentments harden into bitterness, and bitterness hardens into hate. Forgiveness and resilience are sometimes in short supply. At times the plot line feels a bit contrived. But the writing is powerful, and the conclusion that people can start fresh and need not be defined by family calamities or sins resonates.

2 people found this helpful

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