Into That Good Night

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Rozelle splices together two eras in a potentially tricky structure that ultimately yields a spare, beautifully written memoir about fatherhood, bravery, memory and one man in particular. His recollection of his childhood in a small east Texas town also reconstructs his father, Lester, a once vigorous, strong-willed man whose own memory was decimated by Alzheimer's. Other sections from the early 1990s compare Rozelle's still-new experiences of paternity with his evolving relationship with his own father. When Rozelle, a high school English teacher, was growing up in Oakwood in the 1950s and '60s, Lester was the school superintendent of the "white" school, where he formerly taught, as well as of the town's "black" school. While Rozelle offers many details of life in a small Southern town, this is not an exercise in nostalgia. Lester was an upright man who publicly supported the Supreme Court decision that mandated school integration. That same quiet strength helped Rozelle deal with the death of his mother, who committed suicide after she was unsuccessfully treated for cancer. The author's skillful and compassionate writing brings both the father of his childhood and the man who could not remember the names of his own children to life. Lester died of a stroke in 1992, but this serves, as his son intended, as a moving tribute. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

In Rozelle's loving memoir of his late father, a longtime Texas school superintendent, we glimpse a dimly lit picture of an aging man whose character never quite emerges. The author, himself a high-school English teacher in the Houston area, alternates reminiscences of his youth with entries from 1991þ92, when his father, Lester, began at age 85 "to slip a bit," experiencing "short moments of confusion, the hesitation before taking a step." Poignant scenes show Lester getting lost in the house; forgetting that his wife was not at the store, but instead out of town; and even failing to recognize his son: "I have a son who teaches school," Lester informs Ron. þNow, tell me again Who are you?" Sad but, in an 85-year- old, not tragic And the author goes on to draw a shaky portrait of his fatherþs life in happier years. Flashing back to the1960s, when Lester faced the challenge posed by integration to his school system, Rozelle says little about his father's actual stance. Ditto Rozelle-the-elderþs stint as a political appointee under President Johnson and even when teaching at a prison. We do learn that the purchase of a fishing cottage (although he did not fish) and a car trip to Florida "were exceptions to an otherwise predictable life." More vivid is the evocation of Rozelle's chain-smoking, ailing mother who, stoked with too many medicines, would ultimately shoot herself to death. And a powerful scene of youthful racism has the young Rozelle denying his black playmates to a group of taunting boys: "They ain't my friends," he insists. Even a slight memoir has its moments. But the real story seems to lie buried somewhere below the surface of theauthorþs recollections of good times with his mother and under Rozelleþs reflections on his changing East Texas neighborhood.