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Overview
The author of the bestselling memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler presents a profound debut novel — in the tradition of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Zadie Smith's White Teeth — that captures the dynamics of class and race in today's urban integrated communities.
Nathan McCall's novel, Them, tells a compelling story set in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood known for its main street, Auburn Avenue, which once was regarded as the "richest Negro street in the world."
The story centers around Barlowe Reed, a single, forty-something African American who rents a ramshackle house on Randolph Street, just a stone's throw from the historic birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Barlowe, who works as a printer, otherwise passes the time reading and hanging out with other men at the corner store. He shares his home and loner existence with a streetwise, twentysomething nephew who is struggling to get his troubled life back on track.
When Sean and Sandy Gilmore, a young white couple, move in next door, Barlowe and Sandy develop a reluctant, complex friendship as they hold probing — often frustrating — conversations over the backyard fence.
Members of both households, and their neighbors as well, try to go about their business, tending to their homes and jobs. However, fear and suspicion build — and clashes ensue — with each passing day, as more and more new whites move in and make changes and once familiar people and places disappear.
Using a blend of superbly developed characters in a story that captures the essence of this country's struggles with the unsettling realities of gentrification, McCall has produced a truly great American novel.
Synopsis
This combination fo superbly developed characters, a realistic story line, and descriptions that profoundly capture the essence of this country's urban experience-in black and white-is the formula for the making of this truly great American novel.
The Barnes & Noble Review
In Them, Nathan McCall, best known as a memoirist, has tried his hand at fiction with a timely tale of gentrification and its attendant misunderstandings. Set in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward, Them traces the gradual yuppification of a historically black neighborhood and the explosive racial tensions that follow suit. At its center is the tentative relationship -- never quite the friendship the novel would have you believe -- that develops between resident paranoiac Barlowe Reed and the white armchair liberal who moves in next door.
McCall, to his credit, gives voice to a whole slew of viewpoints, whether the characters are nostalgic '60s civil rights activists struggling to adapt their tactics to a new plight or eager gentrifiers who are blind to why their gestures of civic pride fall short. Though the foundations are in place for a story full of messy realizations and even messier politics, the characters never quite manage to be as complex as the story line in which they are confined. Too often, McCall falls prey to the temptation of exposition: jabs that cross racial lines come with italics ("You never could be too sure with them," Barlowe warily sums up the newcomer Sandy Gilmore) and the dialogue has a way of lining up difficult questions a little too neatly. Still, Them meets its subject matter head on and gives a nervy glimpse of a community under siege. --Amelia Atlas
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Nathan McCall's debut novel, Them, a mirror of our time and souls, is awesome and destined to become a contemporary classic." — Eric Jerome Dickey, New York Times bestselling author"What should we write about in our complex and changing world? And how? These are the questions that a writer constantly asks....Nathan McCall masterfully provides us with an answer. His novel could be taken as a model for modern writing." — Maryse Condé,award-winning author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman
"Them is a character-driven, insightful novel that gives readers an entertaining and balanced glance at gentrification. Nathan McCall has done a brilliant job of showcasing his talent, while at the same time showing his compassion for human nature." — Zane, New York Times bestselling author of Afterburn
"Nathan McCall's honesty and insight captivated the nation in Makes Me Wanna Holler, and those qualities drive his sure-handed leap to fiction in McCall's beautifully written first novel,Them. With painstaking balance and vivid characters both black and white, Them is a gripping and timely dispatch from the unfolding story of race relations in America. Nathan McCall is a national treasure." — Tananarive Due, American Book Award-winning author of Joplin's Ghost and Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights
"Complex and flawed characters weave a story that tests our own contradictory feelings about gentrification and racial and class bias. A compelling read." — Erica Simone Turnipseed, author of A Love Noire, Hunger, and the upcoming My Name Is Zanzibar
Publishers Weekly
The embattled characters who people McCall's trenchant, slyly humorous debut novel (following the 1994 memoir Makes Me Wanna Hollerand a 1997 essay collection) can't escape gentrification, whether as victim or perpetrator. As he turns 40, Barlowe Reed, who is black, moves to buy the home he's long rented in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. His timing is bad: whites have taken note of the cheap, rehab-ready houses in the historically black neighborhood and, as Barlowe's elderly neighbor says to him, "They comin." Skyrocketing housing prices and the new neighbors' presumptuousness anger Barlowe, whose 20-something nephew is staying with him, and other longtime residents, who feel invaded and threatened. Battle lines are drawn, but when a white couple moves in next door to Barlowe, the results are surprising. Masterfully orchestrated and deeply disturbing illustrations of the depth of the racial divide play out behind the scrim of Barlowe's awkward attempts to have conversations in public with new white neighbor Sandy. McCall also beautifully weaves in the decades-long local struggle over King's legacy, including the moment when a candidate for King's church's open pulpit is rejected for "linguistic lapses... unbefitting of the crisp doctoral eloquence of Martin Luther King." McCall nails such details again and again, and the results, if less than hopeful, are poignant and grimly funny. (Nov.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationSchool Library Journal
McCall (MakesMe Wanna Holler) follows up his autobiography with a first novel that focuses directly on the old Fourth Ward of Atlanta, the former home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Now the neighborhood is changing, as white couples find this the perfect place to resettle. The "gentrification" of the area begins next door to Barlowe Reed, an African American through whom McCall filters the anger, tensions, and sensibilities of the community. With his new neighbor Sandy and her husband, Sean, old grievances, beliefs, and hopes are explored and tested. McCall manages to make the characters fully genuine, and narrator Mirron Willis brings them quite expertly to life. Much more happens within the minds of these characters than in many more action-packed stories. Recommended.
—Joyce Kessel Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
From memoirist and journalist McCall (What's Going On: Personal Essays, 1997, etc.), a debut novel about an Atlanta neighborhood undergoing gentrification-or invasion, depending on your point of view. The Old Fourth Ward, birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., is a little run-down now that affluent blacks have been siphoned off to the integrated suburbs, but it's still a cozy African-American community that's tolerant of the old men who sit gabbing every day outside the Auburn Avenue Mini Mart, of the drunk couple often staggering along the sidewalks and of the homeless man always hustling for odd jobs. The Fourth suits Barlowe Reed, who dreams of buying the shabby house he rents at 1024 Randolph St., if he can just get a decent raise out of his cracker boss at the Copy Right Print Shop. It also appeals to Sean and Sandy Gilmore, part of an influx of whites drawn to the handsome old houses available "for the cost of a ham sandwich." Sean and Sandy want to be good neighbors; they can't understand why everyone regards them with hostility and suspicion. Readers will get it, as potholes neglected for years are filled in, police patrols appear out of nowhere to roust the drunks, and whites get elected to all the offices of the Fourth Ward Civic League, which promptly calls for an end to outdoor card-playing (so rowdy) and frontyard barbecues ("those hideous steel drums"). The tentative friendship between next-door neighbors Sandy and Barlowe doesn't stand a chance in this increasingly tense atmosphere as tires are slashed and fires started in the mailboxes of white-owned homes. McCall's characterizations are vivid rather than deep: With the exception of Sandy, all white folks are cluelesslyarrogant, and among the somewhat more fully drawn African-Americans, only Barlowe has any real depth. The plot is similarly schematic; what matters here is McCall's painfully honest portrait of a nation racked by racial mistrust. Squirm-inducing, which surely was the author's intention. Agent: Faith Childs/Faith Childs Literary Agency Inc.The Barnes & Noble Review
In Them, Nathan McCall, best known as a memoirist, has tried his hand at fiction with a timely tale of gentrification and its attendant misunderstandings. Set in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward, Them traces the gradual yuppification of a historically black neighborhood and the explosive racial tensions that follow suit. At its center is the tentative relationship -- never quite the friendship the novel would have you believe -- that develops between resident paranoiac Barlowe Reed and the white armchair liberal who moves in next door.McCall, to his credit, gives voice to a whole slew of viewpoints, whether the characters are nostalgic '60s civil rights activists struggling to adapt their tactics to a new plight or eager gentrifiers who are blind to why their gestures of civic pride fall short. Though the foundations are in place for a story full of messy realizations and even messier politics, the characters never quite manage to be as complex as the story line in which they are confined. Too often, McCall falls prey to the temptation of exposition: jabs that cross racial lines come with italics ("You never could be too sure with them," Barlowe warily sums up the newcomer Sandy Gilmore) and the dialogue has a way of lining up difficult questions a little too neatly. Still, Them meets its subject matter head on and gives a nervy glimpse of a community under siege. --Amelia Atlas