The Night Train

Starred review from March 28, 2011
Great historical tides rise slowly, particularly in the rural 1963 North Carolina of Edgerton's slick tale (after The Bible Salesman) of music and racial revolution. The surreptitiously exhibited but strong teenage friendship between Larry Lime Beacon of Time Reckoning Breathe on Me Nolan (yes, that's his entire name), an aspiring jazz pianist hoping to ride his musical talent out of rural segregation, and Dwayne Hallston, a middle-class white boy enamored of James Brown, frames the tumult and upheaval of the civil rights movement in East and West Starke, N.C. The two music-mad boys live in divided communities, poignantly characterized by the burdens of their respective pasts, which "brought hardships to the people of West Starke not understood by the people of East Starke, and guilt to the East not understood by anybodyâa guilt that if moving deep in a lake, would leave the surface flat calm." Edgerton sustains a wry tone in this lightly plotted novel, where the action is confined to band practices, a chicken flung over a cinema balcony, and well-intentioned but comically inept attempts at integration. The characters are drawn with compassion and droll humor, and while not much happens to them, what happens between them is the work of a generous, restrained writer whose skill and craft allows small scenes to tell a larger, more profound story.

May 1, 2011

James Brown connects two boys, white and black, in a light novel about North Carolina in the tense 1960s.

Veteran novelist Edgerton (The Bible Salesman, 2008, etc.) is profoundly skilled at taking on some of Southern literature's most difficult themes—race and religion especially—and addressing them with both respect and humor. The hero of his latest, set in 1963, is Larry Lime, a black teenager whose musical talent is nurtured by the Bleeder, the star pianist at a club on the outskirts of a small North Carolina town. Larry takes what he's learned to his job at a furniture shop, where he advises Dwayne, who's trying to get his band to play a note-for-note version of James Brown's iconic Live at the Apollo album. Southern mores demand that Larry support Dwayne (who's white) without attracting attention, and Edgerton deftly shifts from intimate looks at their growing friendship to wide-angle shots of the racial divides among businesses and residents in the area. And he smartly merges social commentary with comedy: As Larry and Dwayne concoct a ridiculous plot to toss a chicken from a movie-theater balcony during a tense scene in The Birds, Edgerton gently highlights how the theater's segregation policy inspired the idea in the first place. Various subplots involving Larry's extended family underscore the point that the color line was more porous than anybody wanted to admit at the time, though in the closing chapters Edgerton strains to sound an uplifting note without coming off as mawkish. Still, the command of Southern idioms and culture that earned him his reputation remains solid, and his affinity for simple sentences and clean chapter breaks give this slim novel an almost fable-like power.

Edgerton's knowledge about music is on full display, as is his understanding of the subtleties of race relations as the Civil Rights Movement picked up steam.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011

In 1963 North Carolina, white teenager Dwayne wants to play like James Brown, and his secret friend, black teenager Larry, wants to play like Thelonius Monk. Maybe music can help them break barriers and achieve their dreams. From beloved Southern novelist Edgerton (e.g., The Bible Salesman), who's even a songwriter with a band; there's a five-city tour and a reading group guide.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2011
The delightfulness of the opening scene sets the stage for this novels key elements. A black jazz-guitarist called the Bleeder sits in the daytime emptiness of a bar in small-town North Carolinathe only regular jazz spot within a hundred milesand conducts an impromptu guitar lesson for a teenage black boy who has just wandered in. Its 1963, and the nascent civil rights movement is moving in locally. But at the same time, black-white differences continue to abound. Music is the best vehicle for cutting across those boundaries. As locally famous performer Bobby Lee Reese says, I can tell you about my audience on both sides of the track. Edgerton frames his sensitive new novel around the unlikely and disapproved-of friendship between Larry, the boy the Bleeder is teaching to play, and Dwayne, a white boy who fronts a group called the Amazing Rumblers and is determined to break out of town on a talent ticket. It is the wealth of well-understood characters that carries the reader through this engaging novels easily consumed pages. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Print advertising in the New York Times Book Review and a national media campaign will augment Edgertons own name recognition in bringing his new novel to widespread attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)