The Blue Star, by Tony Earley (Little, Brown and Company: 2008)
After reading Earley's novel Jim the Boy last year, I eagerly wanted to read the continuation of Jim Glass's story. I think he was eight years old in that novel. I liked being with Jim in the little town of Aliceville, North Carolina -- he was innocent, and his life and character reflected a supposedly more innocent time. I liked him, his single mother (his young father had died before Jim was born), and his three good-natured bachelor uncles.
And I wasn't disappointed in The Blue Star, which picks up with Jim as a high school senior, about to fall truly in love with Chrissie, a girl who has a somewhat complicated past (complicated, at least for Jim). The novel focuses on this young-love drama and its small cast of characters. It's really a small family drama, with Uncle Zeno playing an unexpected role. There's longing, innocent and not so innocent, unrequited love, bad luck, and ultimately the incursion of events larger than Aliceville, when Jim is drafted for the army and World War II.
Jim is young, and he loves Chrissie with a pure sense of self-sacrifice and honor. In fact, he's honorable throughout. I think we wouldn't want him any other way. And yet I found myself questioning the book's somewhat sanitary approach to its characters and their actions. Even the intimate scenes (for example, Jim with his former girlfriend in the back seat of a car) have a kind of cleaned up, abstract feeling about them, as if Earley is writing for a young audience that he wants to protect from messy details. The book verges on sentimentality, without actually falling into it. Earley is a good writer, and the narrative has enough real truth in it to present Jim as a real flesh-and-blood young man.
No comments:
Post a Comment