After I read Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness, I learned from Cathy that she had read the author’s first novel and was enthusiastic. Thanks, Cathy, I am so happy to have read this.
At the outset I wondered how a novel set in 2008 in Detroit, a city that had been in economic decline beginning in the 1950s could possibly bring me joy. The focus is the Turner family whose life on Yarrow Street coincides with that decline. The thirteen children of Francis and Viola are grown and scattered across the country and in flashbacks we learn that Francis and Viola made their way from abject poverty in the South to Detroit as part of the Great Migration. They bought the house on Yarrow street and were able to support their children. With the decline of Detroit, the house is now underwater. I had forgotten that term which means that the debt is greater than the value of the house. The other term that took me back to those years is short-selling which means abandoning the loan and letting the house go to the bank without receiving its meager value.
The Turner house was vacant, as Viola was living with her oldest son Cha-Cha and his wife after her stroke. He had been the bedrock of the family for years, but was having problems made more complicated by the “haint” which occasionally appeared to him. The youngest sibling Lelah, whose gambling had caused her to lose her job and be evicted, had secretly taken refuge in the Yarrow Street house. The focus is on Cha-Cha, his wife Tina, Lelah, and her daughter; their struggles make them come alive for the reader. Cha-Cha’s complicated connection to his Black therapist who was raised in a White family are especially interesting. The time the author spends describing what is happening in Lelah’s head as she copes with her gambling addiction is riveting and uncomfortable.
The very brief mention of Barack Obama was for me a beautiful little note of joy. Otherwise there is no mention of political matters or race issues; these matters are addressed by getting to know the lives of these people. An impressive book.
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 341 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.