Copperhead

May 1, 2019
A slow, gritty coming-of-age story in which class, racial, and family tensions come to a head in one long weekend. It's a snowy November Friday in upstate New York, and Jessup is 17, smart, and a fine linebacker who may be tackling for Yale next year. In a playoff game, he makes a crushing hit and scores. But in the parking lot later, the black player he took down, Corson, confronts Jessup, who is white, and terrible events are set in motion that will leave Corson dead and Jessup mired in a coverup that spotlights his dark family history. His brother, Ricky, is serving a 20-year sentence for killing two black men four years earlier when they attacked him because of racist tattoos on his torso. Jessup's stepfather, David John, went to prison on a lesser, related charge and is just out. The family attends the Blessed Church of the White America, where the elders "have been promising a racial holy war." The police go after Jessup as an obvious suspect in Corson's death, and a media-savvy church member sees a martyr who can rally more whites to the cause. Jessup is a likable but painfully ambivalent young man, closely tied to his family yet silently opposed to their racist credo and desperate to escape their trailer home, their muddle of virtues and vile racism. It's a stretch for him to have a black girlfriend but more implausible for her to not know of his family history before they become intimate. Zentner (The Lobster Kings, 2015, etc.), a Canada-born novelist, has written two literary works under his own name and four thrillers as Ezekiel Boone. His characters here are well-drawn, though the story has some weak spots and his bedeviled linebacker is prone to repetition that can sound at times like whining. A persuasive take on a familiar theme: the venomous prejudices lurking in small communities.

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May 13, 2019
Zentner (Touch) wades into thorny racial and class thickets in this steely and often gripping novel. The action unfolds over several days in the rural university town of Cortaca, N.Y., a thinly veiled Ithaca. Jessup is a high school senior who “will always have been born into the wrong family,” blue-collar congregants of the Blessed Church of White America. He stopped attending the white nationalist church after his half-brother and stepfather were convicted in the beating death of two black college students four years earlier. Jessup excels at athletics and academics, and is dating the daughter of his black football coach, when his stepfather’s release stirs up old memories in Cortaca, where “history is everything.” A racially-tinged accident involving a boy from a neighboring town forces Jessup, aware of how bad it will look given his family history, to return to the Church, and its 20-year-old media-savvy spokesman, for help. The short chapters, most no longer than three pages, lend the narrative a propulsive, if occasionally choppy, feel. There’s a tendency to hammer home themes such as the indelible markings of family and class, and in the book’s last third, the taut drama morphs briefly into a conspiratorial thriller that strains credulity. Nonetheless, Zentner’s portrait of a young man’s conflicting desires for disavowal and belonging is rich and nuanced.

July 1, 2019
Zentner's (The Lobster Kings, 2014) latest novel dramatizes the impact of hate and violence on small-town America. Gentle-hearted Jessup is a high-school linebacker who hopes to score a college scholarship and leave Cortaca, his hometown in upstate New York. Known for its respectable university, Cortaca's outskirts are lined with trailer parks, in one of which Jessup's family lives. But his desire to skip town has less to do with his backwoods upbringing and more to do with escaping his family's stigma as white supremacists. His brother is in prison for killing two Black boys, and his stepfather has just been released after arrest for a related but lesser charge on the very day of Cortaca High's first playoff game in years. Jessup pummels the opposing team's star running back and becomes the hero, but his big hit stirs tensions that result in a death, drawing national media attention and turning Jessup's life upside down. With punchy prose that evokes Jessup's fight to sidestep his family's shadow, Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America's longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)