A 115-year-old man lays on his deathbed as the 2016 US election results arrive, and revisits his life in this moving story of love, fatherhood, and the American century from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler
A visionary and poignant novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to his fledgling newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, snippets of history are brought sharply into focus.
Sam grows up in Louisiana, with a harsh father, who he comes to resent both for his physical abuse and for what Sam eventually perceives as his flawed morality. Eager to escape and prove himself, Sam enlists in the army as a sniper while still underage. The hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, but, as he recounts these tales on his deathbed, we come to realize that it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the US, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to all the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam's at almost every turn.
As he contemplates his relationships - with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son - Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years.
It's such a pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for Late City today. Many thanks to Robert Olen Butler, No Exit Press and Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me and for my advance copy of the novel.
It's a quarter to 2 in the morning on November 9th, 2016 and just ten minutes after Donald Trump was elected President of the USA, 115-year-old Sam Cunningham starts to die in his Chicago nursing home. With his family long passed before him, Sam is alone but then he hears the voice of God and so begins this high concept, thoughtful contemplation of his life.
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Olen Butler's Paris in the Dark when I read it a few years ago and although Late City is a very different sort of novel, there is a similar perceptive restraint to the vignettes of events from Sam's past. As an atheist, I wondered if I would find Late City too mawkish or proselytising but the God here is best viewed as a conduit, allowing the present day, dying Sam to access his memories according to His commandment to "live your stories just as they felt in their own moment, with the next day's news yet to happen."
As a newsman, Sam's life becomes a series of stories in the late city edition of his own, personalised Cunningham Examiner and what is left out is perhaps just as important as the moments he does relive. With such a long life behind him, this flowing narrative has no chapters and becomes a reflection of the American century which finds Sam observing and occasionally having a small role in the events that made the country – for good or ill. As his consciousness flits between the conversations he has with God in his darkened room and the real-time accounts from his past, Robert Olen Butler keeps the novel engagingly condensed, with most of the time-frame taking place between his childhood and the end of World War II as this was the period which most shaped the man.
Growing up in the Deep South means race relations inevitably feature in the early part of the book as his domineering, violent father casually explains away racial segregation as something reasonable and necessary, then later beats Sam for the sin of criticising America. If this was a harsh judgement then Sam faces further blows, albeit of the emotional kind as he confronts the mistakes and shortcomings which still haunt him on his deathbed. From the closed-off attitude he learned from his father, which renders him almost paralysed by inaction during a particularly poignant scene during his service in France as an underaged sniper in WWI to his long career at a Chicago newspaper where his obsessive attention to the job steals away his time from his wife and son and results in him repeating and reframing his own flawed masculinity, Sam is always a sympathetic character but he is no more blameless than anybody else.
His interactions with real-life figures of the period, most notably Al Capone and Huey Long means comparisons with Forrest Gump are inevitable but despite his proximity to major events such as the Chicago race riots of 1919 or his personal connection to the first ever nuclear weapon, this is less an extraordinary tale of one man's influence upon a nation than a look at how somebody becomes moulded by where, when and with whom they live.
The final part of the novel allows Sam and the reader a glimpse into the stories of others and I read the last few pages with tears in my eyes. Late City is a beautifully written, profoundly moving look at a country which seems to be destined to repeat its preference for bitter division over unity and an intimate, sensitive portrait of a man who has to learn to accept and forgive himself. I thought it was wonderful and highly recommend it.
Late City is published in the UK by No Exit Press, purchasing links can be found here. Please support independent bookshops whenever possible.
Don't miss the rest of the blog tour, details are below.
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Thanks for the blog tour support x
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