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Jay Porter, a struggling Black lawyer with a criminal record, takes his eight-month pregnant wife out for a romantic birthday dinner on a boat when they hear gunshots and a splash. He jumps into the dark water and rescues a white woman from drowning, an act of heroism which he comes to regret greatly when he learns of a white man who was shot to death that night...
Black Water Rising is an ambitious, complex first novel. There's a parallel plotline about Jay's past as an activist in the 1960s, in which he has an affair with a white woman, Cynthia, and ends up framed for inciting a riot. In the present day (1981 Houston), Cynthia is the mayor, and Jay's deeply traumatized and while justifiably paranoid, his refusal to get emotionally close or open up about his past is damaging his relationship with his eight-month-pregnant wife who's too good for him.
Jay's father-in-law is involved with strike negotiations involving a historically Black and historically white union which have recently joined together, and Jay gets involved in that when a Black union member gets beaten up by white union members.
Jay starts secretly investigating the shooting of the white man, which he thinks was done by the woman he saved from drowning.
He also has an actual caseload of low-level clients. I was convinced almost until the end of the book that the client that Jay always calling "the hooker" and ignoring was going to be a "you shouldn't just dismiss people" thing and she would be relevant to the main story, especially since she was claiming to have given a guy a blow job while he was driving and the murder victim was found in the driver's seat with his pants down. She was not relevant at all and her story ended limply. This was unfortunate as the storyline I was most interested in was "Jay Porter, struggling Black lawyer," and that was the storyline Attica Locke was least interested in.
There's also a plotline about oil, because this is 1981 Houston.
This is a lot and it felt like it. The opening scene is fantastic, as are several other individual scenes, Locke's prose is excellent, and the social commentary is dead-on. But the book as a whole felt slow and overstuffed, and while the storylines did come together reasonably well, they came together in an anticlimactic manner. I was really invested in Jay's relationship with his wife, and by the end of the book, I didn't feel like I knew whether things had improved between them or were basically the same. The ending felt like "...that's it?"
( Read more... )
Black Water Rising is an ambitious, complex first novel. There's a parallel plotline about Jay's past as an activist in the 1960s, in which he has an affair with a white woman, Cynthia, and ends up framed for inciting a riot. In the present day (1981 Houston), Cynthia is the mayor, and Jay's deeply traumatized and while justifiably paranoid, his refusal to get emotionally close or open up about his past is damaging his relationship with his eight-month-pregnant wife who's too good for him.
Jay's father-in-law is involved with strike negotiations involving a historically Black and historically white union which have recently joined together, and Jay gets involved in that when a Black union member gets beaten up by white union members.
Jay starts secretly investigating the shooting of the white man, which he thinks was done by the woman he saved from drowning.
He also has an actual caseload of low-level clients. I was convinced almost until the end of the book that the client that Jay always calling "the hooker" and ignoring was going to be a "you shouldn't just dismiss people" thing and she would be relevant to the main story, especially since she was claiming to have given a guy a blow job while he was driving and the murder victim was found in the driver's seat with his pants down. She was not relevant at all and her story ended limply. This was unfortunate as the storyline I was most interested in was "Jay Porter, struggling Black lawyer," and that was the storyline Attica Locke was least interested in.
There's also a plotline about oil, because this is 1981 Houston.
This is a lot and it felt like it. The opening scene is fantastic, as are several other individual scenes, Locke's prose is excellent, and the social commentary is dead-on. But the book as a whole felt slow and overstuffed, and while the storylines did come together reasonably well, they came together in an anticlimactic manner. I was really invested in Jay's relationship with his wife, and by the end of the book, I didn't feel like I knew whether things had improved between them or were basically the same. The ending felt like "...that's it?"
( Read more... )
