All Aunt Hagar's Children | Edward P. Jones | ENGROSSING, FORCEFUL, AND IMPECCABLY CRAFTED

All Aunt Hagar's Children | Edward P. Jones | beautiful writing about the real world

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All Aunt Hagar's C...

	All Aunt Hagar's Children Edward P. Jones Amistad, 2006 - 399 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

ENGROSSING, FORCEFUL, AND IMPECCABLY CRAFTED

Some things are well worth waiting for and Edward P. Jonses's follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel "The Known World" (2003) is most assuredly one of them. Once again he uses short story formats to illuminate and make memorable his characters, ordinary people, really, but to the reader they are unforgettable. This author's evocation of black life in America is incomparable.

The 14 stories that comprise "All Aunt Hagar's Children" are set in Washington, the city where Jones was raised and now lives. He opens with "In The Blink of God's Eye," the story of Ruth and Aubrey, a young couple in their late teens and recently married. Ruth does not always rest well in "godforsaken Washington" while Aubrey "always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood." One night when Ruth was wakeful she went out in back where she found a baby tied in a bundle hanging from a tree limb. Thus, she thought Washington was "a city where they hung babies in night trees."

As is his wont Jones treats readers to the earlier lives of his characters, rendering them all the more accessible and sympathetic. This is especially true in "Resurrecting Methuselah" in which we meet Anita Channing who sits by the bedside of Bethany, her ill daughter. She sits in a wooden chair built a century and a half ago by a former slave. Anita's husband, Percival, is serving in Okinawa, where he spends much time with a prostitute, Sara Lee. When Percival discovers he has breast cancer he calls Anita and asks her to come to him. She reaches Honolulu, a stopover in her flight, where she has an opportunity to look back on her childhood and wonder what the future holds for herself and her child.

"All Aunt Hagar's Children" concludes with "Tapestry," another story of a young couple, Anne and George, marrying and leaving their rural roots behind. George is a porter on a train, the train that carries them to Washington. As the train slows close to its destination Anne whispers, Mama, Papa, "I'm a long way from home."

For this reader that was the gist of all of these marvelous stories, people seeking a better life a long way from home.

Jones is such an incredibly gifted writer, his prose is succinct, true, impeccably crafted. Reading his work is not only a pleasure but a privilege as well.

- Gail Cooke

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beautiful writing about the real world

This collection of stories really has depth and insight. Edward P. Jones writes about the black community in Washington D.C. with great compassion and understanding. There is considerable heartbreak here, but it is presented with such sensitivity and authenticity that it is hard to put down. Jones needs to get some more awards with this one. It is beautifully crafted literary work that deals with the real world.

Great

The best writers--or at least the most memorable--are the ones who can break the rules of writing and somehow still tell a great story or convince us of something. Jones often changes points of view, shifts time, and fills his stories with a variety of characters. He seems to lack the ability to write a one-dimensional, uninteresting character. Even the one or two stories in the collection that I didn't particularly like left me wanting to read more. And I felt as I read the stories that each was so well wrought and imagined that Jones could easily turn them each into novels.

Some readers thought that there were too many characters in Jones' novel _The Known World_, which made it a difficult read. But I found little difficulty reading it. In the short story, however, with its limited space, I think that the large number of characters placed in one story give them little breathing room and make the reading a bit challenging. Sometimes Jones falters, but when he gets the story off the ground right, he soars so high that he can be placed among the best short fiction writers today in the English language.

One story, "The Devil Swims Across Anacostia River", despite its provocative title and some amazing passages, I found a little odd and below the quality of the other stories.

Stories such as "Old Boys, Old Girls", "A Rich Man", and "Adam Robinson" are truly short masterpieces. I originally read them in the New Yorker. But however many times I read the stories, they continue to amaze me with their elegance.

Some characters in this book first appeared in _Lost in the City_, Jones' first collection of short stories. Though some stories in _All Aunt Hagar's Children_ approach perfection, _Lost in the City_ was a far more even work, perhaps because of its consistency of style and genre. _All Aunt Hagar's Children_ contains several stories, such as "The Root Worker" and "A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru" (a very Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque title), that have magical realist elements.

After reading all fourteen stories in this book, I felt a pang of grief, as if I had a finished a good conversation with a friend I knew I would never see again.

Read this book. It's simply amazing.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4

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