Twelve Gates to the City

October 10, 2011
After years away, an alienated, conflicted Tommy Lee “TL” Tyson returns to rural Arkansas with a Ph.D. in black studies to deal with the conflict of his roots and the deep dysfunction of his family. In Black’s second novel, set a week after his debut, They Tell Me of a Home, the author lurches unsteadily between TL’s attempt to discover how his younger sister died, his troubled relationship with his parents, his struggles with his sexuality, and the challenge of reintegrating into a small town. The rural rhythms of the characters’ speech, particularly in church scenes, are fun, but those resonant moments are often overshadowed by heavy-handed sentences like “‘I can’t believe I did this,’ he repeated. ‘How in the world am I going to live in Swamp Creek again?’” While many characters are thinly sketched, elements of magical realism (the narrator, à la The Lovely Bones, is dead) mixed with black folkloric tradition are described with conviction and passion. Black’s personal connection to the material gives a hard-won reconciliation genuine emotional impact, but his ambition (Black overstuffs this novel with fragments of memoir, religious celebration, and a manifesto of racial uplift) tangles the story he badly wants to tell.

November 1, 2011
When you go back home, can you really put the ghosts to rest? Can you at least save some lost souls? In Black's (Perfect Peace, 2010) sequel to his debut novel, They Tell Me of a Home (2005), Dr. Thomas L. Tyson (TL) returns home less than an hour after leaving. Back in Swamp Creek, Ark., TL is faced with several mysteries and challenges. Distraught over his sister's untimely death, he worries about the role his adoptive mother, Marion, may have played in Sister's death. Saddened by the death of his birth mother, Ms. Swinton, he wants to prove himself by taking over Ms. Swinton's role as the teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Marion challenges him to become a real man and determine his own fate, but TL must first rid himself of ties that pull him away from Swamp Creek, namely his neglected girlfriend back in New York and his best friend, George, who is desperately in love with him--and perhaps TL is in love with George, too. The town misfit Cliffesteen offers TL another mystery to solve: What happened to her Aunt Easter, a woman the townsfolk feared as magical? Once established as the new schoolteacher, TL accepts the responsibilities of not only educating the children of Swamp Creek, but also of rescuing one particular young boy from his abusive and sexually bigoted father. Further complicating matters, TL is hallucinating a city of gold marked by 12 gates, and Cliffesteen claims Sister is there. So many plot strands quickly overwhelm Black's novel. Interspersed chapters in Sister's otherworldly voice attempt to explain God's plan for TL, yet not even Sister resolves the mysteries presented here. This novel could have been a magical tale of spiritual discovery, yet it buckles under the weight of its own complexity.

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