G. Neri: Tru and Nelle. (Book review)
Very enjoyable, but not quite what I'd hoped for, by which I mean I wanted to love it and didn't, though that might partly been to having had wrong expectations.
What I thought I would get: first of a series of detective novels starring Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children.
What this is: one off novel about Harper Lee's and Truman Capote's childhood friendship. In the course of which they also play detectives (this, btw, was a rl thing, complete with cosplaying Holmes and Watson), but in the way children do, i.e they're looking for a mystery but when they eventually hit on a "mystery", it isn't really one, more of a shaggy dog story their imagination makes into more, though they come up with a few correct conclusions in between. At any rate, it's not the main plot of the novel, which is very reminiscent of, say, Tom Sawyer in the way it's structured, i.e loosely connected anecdotes and a few lingering plot threads.
I should add that it takes enormous guts to tackle the childhood of these two writers, since they've milked it for their own fiction. Which means at least part of your readers will have fictionalized alter egos of two masters of their art in their heads, though this book definitely is written primarily for children as readers. (Who presumably wouldn't have read Capote, even if they should have watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Neri wisely doesn't try to imitate either of their narrative voices, and sticks to third person, sometimes in Nelle's and sometimes in Tru's perspective, though as an appendix he has fun with some Capote and Harper Lee pastiches in the form of first person narrated short stories his child heroes have supposedly written during the course of the novel. (As he mentions, the real short stories were lost, so he gives his versions, which are fun to read, and good natured stylistic exercises to boot.)
Purely taken as a novel for children, it provides them with a pair of misfit heroes, with Tru the more unusual of the two, because tomboy heroines have been popular since decades, but as far as I recall, defiantly "sissy" boy heroes are not. If I were Neri, I'd have trusted my youthful audience more to get the point, because he repeats at least three times that part of what makes the Nelle and Tru friendship is that neither of them fits into gender roles (i.e she's seen as too much of a boy for a girl, he's seen as too much like a girl for a boy), but that doesn't take away from the charm of the combination. (Especially since neither does Nelle get more "feminine" nor Tru ore "masculine" in the course of the narrative; that's not how they influence each other.) Other than not fitting gender roles, our young heroes are also united by passion for books, a wild imagination and having living but absent mothers (Nelle's has mental health problems, Truman's is Holly Golightly a narcissist who can't stand having a child when she yearns to make it in the big city, and specifically can't stand this particular child - as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke once wryly noted, at least his mother ensured he'd never have a "am I gay?" Identity crisis as a teenager, because she told him he was way earlier than that.) Their fathers, otoh, couldn't be more different - Nelle's is her later model for Atticus Finch, Tru's is a charming conman who never pulls off a succesful con. (And isn't much around.)
The 1930s US South setting means the novel has to deal with race as well. There are two poc characters with lines and personality, a boy a bit older than our heroes, and the cook at Truman's aunts' house where he lives. The boy is the occasion for an early scene where Tru and Nelle face the local bullies; note that Nelle is incensed by the unfairness of the situation because she knows the black boy can't fight back (it's unthinkable), and that's why she intervenes, which I think as a way to signal both institutional racism and that Nelle, with the best of intentions and bravery, isn't free from some assumptions herself, it works. As for the cook, Neri tries his best to avoid the "Mammy" cliché, but of course she is an older black woman being roped into helping two white kids in an endeavor (and knowing she'll be held responsible if it goes wrong), and we're in the kids' pov, so while there's enough narrative information to make it clear she has her own life going on and doesn't live for young Truman, we still don't see her outside of how he relates to her. The Ku Klux Klan shows up twice in the novel, the second time in what I automatically assumed was an invented occasion in order to pay homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, because Nelle's father gets to face them down, but no, upon checking, the second occasion actually happened: when eight years old Truman was called to New York to live with his mother for a while, he threw himself a big Halloween farewell party (of course he did), and the Klan, objecting to the presence of the earlier mentioned poc characters among the guests, showed up. (KKK, Monroeville edition, deciding to crash eight years old farewell party is the type of thing that would be called hopelessly over the top if invented, so I should have known it really happened before googling.)
Sidenote: Because I read Go Set a Watchman last year (and of course To Kill a Mockingbird ages ago), I couldn't help but notice that the depiction of racism in Monroeville is markedly different in the prequel/rough draft compared to the other two. In Tru and Nelle, it's there, it's unfair, but most townspeople are benevolent, and the KKK are bumbling bullies and fools whom the good people naturally oppose. There's nothing like the creeping horror when in GSAW, in the adult Jean Louise's pov, she realises that it's everywhere and far from limited to unpleasant brutes.
Back on reviewing track, technical details: Neri gives the child Nelle a Southern accent to be phonetically transcribed, but not the child Truman (though Nelle's has disappeared by the end of the novel from her dialogue) - no idea how accurate that is. Some of the other characters talk in it, too, which is always a bit tricky for me as a foreigner to read. I couldn't help but notice that when they play out their Sherlock Holmes scenarios, Nelle is Watson while Truman is not Holmes but Sherlock, and here I cried foul and clear influence of not one but two more recent tv incarnations. :) (She would have called him Holmes!) This being said, it only made me wish more for the child detective series I had imagined this to be the start of, because I could have read tons more about these two fighting crime.
In conclusion: I liked but didn't love, and now hope for fanfiction providing more and going deeper. This is such a delightful friendship through the decades before the two lost each other in the wake of In Cold Blood and Truman's alcoholism-fueled assholery and self destruction. And in addition to the fighting crime tales, I want the superheroes AU. Because clearly Nelle would have made a great superheroine (complete with shock realisation about mentor) and her withdrawal from the public eye was so she could superhero undetected. Truman provided the intelligence in their investigations by befriending every supervillain ever and making them spill the beans.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1151344.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
What I thought I would get: first of a series of detective novels starring Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children.
What this is: one off novel about Harper Lee's and Truman Capote's childhood friendship. In the course of which they also play detectives (this, btw, was a rl thing, complete with cosplaying Holmes and Watson), but in the way children do, i.e they're looking for a mystery but when they eventually hit on a "mystery", it isn't really one, more of a shaggy dog story their imagination makes into more, though they come up with a few correct conclusions in between. At any rate, it's not the main plot of the novel, which is very reminiscent of, say, Tom Sawyer in the way it's structured, i.e loosely connected anecdotes and a few lingering plot threads.
I should add that it takes enormous guts to tackle the childhood of these two writers, since they've milked it for their own fiction. Which means at least part of your readers will have fictionalized alter egos of two masters of their art in their heads, though this book definitely is written primarily for children as readers. (Who presumably wouldn't have read Capote, even if they should have watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Neri wisely doesn't try to imitate either of their narrative voices, and sticks to third person, sometimes in Nelle's and sometimes in Tru's perspective, though as an appendix he has fun with some Capote and Harper Lee pastiches in the form of first person narrated short stories his child heroes have supposedly written during the course of the novel. (As he mentions, the real short stories were lost, so he gives his versions, which are fun to read, and good natured stylistic exercises to boot.)
Purely taken as a novel for children, it provides them with a pair of misfit heroes, with Tru the more unusual of the two, because tomboy heroines have been popular since decades, but as far as I recall, defiantly "sissy" boy heroes are not. If I were Neri, I'd have trusted my youthful audience more to get the point, because he repeats at least three times that part of what makes the Nelle and Tru friendship is that neither of them fits into gender roles (i.e she's seen as too much of a boy for a girl, he's seen as too much like a girl for a boy), but that doesn't take away from the charm of the combination. (Especially since neither does Nelle get more "feminine" nor Tru ore "masculine" in the course of the narrative; that's not how they influence each other.) Other than not fitting gender roles, our young heroes are also united by passion for books, a wild imagination and having living but absent mothers (Nelle's has mental health problems, Truman's is Holly Golightly a narcissist who can't stand having a child when she yearns to make it in the big city, and specifically can't stand this particular child - as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke once wryly noted, at least his mother ensured he'd never have a "am I gay?" Identity crisis as a teenager, because she told him he was way earlier than that.) Their fathers, otoh, couldn't be more different - Nelle's is her later model for Atticus Finch, Tru's is a charming conman who never pulls off a succesful con. (And isn't much around.)
The 1930s US South setting means the novel has to deal with race as well. There are two poc characters with lines and personality, a boy a bit older than our heroes, and the cook at Truman's aunts' house where he lives. The boy is the occasion for an early scene where Tru and Nelle face the local bullies; note that Nelle is incensed by the unfairness of the situation because she knows the black boy can't fight back (it's unthinkable), and that's why she intervenes, which I think as a way to signal both institutional racism and that Nelle, with the best of intentions and bravery, isn't free from some assumptions herself, it works. As for the cook, Neri tries his best to avoid the "Mammy" cliché, but of course she is an older black woman being roped into helping two white kids in an endeavor (and knowing she'll be held responsible if it goes wrong), and we're in the kids' pov, so while there's enough narrative information to make it clear she has her own life going on and doesn't live for young Truman, we still don't see her outside of how he relates to her. The Ku Klux Klan shows up twice in the novel, the second time in what I automatically assumed was an invented occasion in order to pay homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, because Nelle's father gets to face them down, but no, upon checking, the second occasion actually happened: when eight years old Truman was called to New York to live with his mother for a while, he threw himself a big Halloween farewell party (of course he did), and the Klan, objecting to the presence of the earlier mentioned poc characters among the guests, showed up. (KKK, Monroeville edition, deciding to crash eight years old farewell party is the type of thing that would be called hopelessly over the top if invented, so I should have known it really happened before googling.)
Sidenote: Because I read Go Set a Watchman last year (and of course To Kill a Mockingbird ages ago), I couldn't help but notice that the depiction of racism in Monroeville is markedly different in the prequel/rough draft compared to the other two. In Tru and Nelle, it's there, it's unfair, but most townspeople are benevolent, and the KKK are bumbling bullies and fools whom the good people naturally oppose. There's nothing like the creeping horror when in GSAW, in the adult Jean Louise's pov, she realises that it's everywhere and far from limited to unpleasant brutes.
Back on reviewing track, technical details: Neri gives the child Nelle a Southern accent to be phonetically transcribed, but not the child Truman (though Nelle's has disappeared by the end of the novel from her dialogue) - no idea how accurate that is. Some of the other characters talk in it, too, which is always a bit tricky for me as a foreigner to read. I couldn't help but notice that when they play out their Sherlock Holmes scenarios, Nelle is Watson while Truman is not Holmes but Sherlock, and here I cried foul and clear influence of not one but two more recent tv incarnations. :) (She would have called him Holmes!) This being said, it only made me wish more for the child detective series I had imagined this to be the start of, because I could have read tons more about these two fighting crime.
In conclusion: I liked but didn't love, and now hope for fanfiction providing more and going deeper. This is such a delightful friendship through the decades before the two lost each other in the wake of In Cold Blood and Truman's alcoholism-fueled assholery and self destruction. And in addition to the fighting crime tales, I want the superheroes AU. Because clearly Nelle would have made a great superheroine (complete with shock realisation about mentor) and her withdrawal from the public eye was so she could superhero undetected. Truman provided the intelligence in their investigations by befriending every supervillain ever and making them spill the beans.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1151344.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.