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2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
Race in the American South a review by Jeff Abernathy Clyde Edgerton. The Night Train. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Jeff Abernathy is the author of To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel (University of Georgia Press, 2003). A Virginia native with a PhD from the University of Florida, he is currently serving as President of Alma College in Michigan. Clyde Edgerton was interviewed for NCLR’s 2003 flight issue, which also includes an article on his novels The Floatplane Notebooks (Algonquin, 1988) and In Memory of Junior (Algonquin, 1992). He is the recipient of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Where Trouble Sleeps (Algonquin, 1997; reviewed in NCLR 1998) and the Ragan Old North State Award for Solo: My Adventures in the Air (Algonquin, 2005; reviewed in NCLR 2006).
Clyde Edgerton’s latest novel, The Night Train, needs a companion CD. Any book so steeped in the racial and cultural bouillabaisse that was popular music at mid-century ought to have music. James Brown’s rewriting of the blues standard “Night Train” – made famous on his monumental 1963 album Live at the Apollo – would have done nicely, as Brown’s music infuses much of the novel and inspires each of its main characters. Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” would be another inspired choice. Amidst the slow development of racial balance in the South, Edgerton’s tenth novel returns to his familiar North Carolina by examining community life in Starke, circa 1963. This short novel traces the relationship of Dwayne Hallston, a seventeenyear-old white male, and his black friend Larry Lime Nolan, who both work at a furniture store owned by Dwayne’s father. Both are also aspiring musicians: Dwayne comes to admire James Brown (Live at the Apollo has just been released), while Larry Lime grows ever more fascinated with Monk’s complex jazz. Dwayne’s friendship with Larry Lime provides Dwayne with a glimpse into a different world that he will come to see as a hidden soundtrack to the life he wants to live. Intrigued by James Brown’s latest album, Dwayne and his band, the Amazing Rumblers, learn Live at the Apollo note for note so that they can perform the album as a whole. When finally Dwayne wins a spot on a local television show and plays “Night Train,” for a stunned white studio audience (and an inspired black
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television audience at home: “White boy gettin’ down. He gettin’ down” [203]), he models a new racial consciousness. Other similar transformations take place as well, as when Flash Acres, a foreman in the furniture store, watches as his mother’s life slowly ends. After his mother’s stroke, Flash is forced to hire Larry Lime’s mother, Canary, to take care of her. When Flash’s mother finally dies, Flash spontaneously embraces Canary, demonstrating perhaps that both of them have started to overcome the prejudice that characterized their earlier lives. The story repeats a central pattern in the Southern novel, in which a white protagonist experiences moral growth by crossing racial lines. Like Huck Finn and other white protagonists in the Southern novel, Dwayne grows through his relationships that cross the color line. Larry Lime becomes a kind of muse for Dwayne, and Dwayne’s mimicry of James Brown becomes implicit affirmation of an expanded selfhood. Edgerton is less interested in the psychological or political questions of race than in the human need for connection through music. We never see into these characters’ psyches in order to understand their motivations, just as we see remarkably little of the tension of race relations in the South in 1963. But Edgerton’s rich portrayal of musical transcendence in the novel offers a new approach to a central American story of race in which the South, the region, is the stage upon which race in America, the nation, is enacted. n
above RIGHT Clyde Edgerton at the Turnage Theatre in Washington, NC, 16 March 2008; sponsored by the Friends of Brown Library. At this event, NCLR recorded Edgerton reading from his novel Lunch at the Picadilly for the CD that accompanied NCLR’s 2008 humor issue. Edgerton also read from his novel The Bible Salesman (2008; reviewed in NCLR 2009).