African Americans - Fiction & Literature, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Phases of Life - Fiction, Crimes - Fiction
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Overview
That's Randall Roberts talking, with laserlike vision and a voice as biting as a snap of a whip. He's talking about his father, a successful psychiatrist burdened by the masochistic tendencies of a Jesus Christ complex. About his mother, whose obsession with social status and appearance has transformed a family's love into obligation. About his married sister, Sonny, struggling with the travails of marriage, and his other sister, Yolanda, a.k.a. Yogi, out to give a new definition to rebellion. And, of course, he's talking about his own twelve-year-old self, an introvert on the verge of giving in to violent impulses. Lionel Newton's first novel, Getting Right with God, established him as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction. Now he extends and enhances that distinction with this absorbing novel about the disintegration of a black middle-class family within the sweet serenity of suburban Long Island. This deterioration begins when the father, deeply troubled and increasingly disoriented, isolates himself in the library to write obscure religious commentary. As a secretive relationship between father and son sets off a chain reaction of mistrust and adultery, the antisocial Randall gets a foretaste of the treachery of the adult world, and learns the painful lesson that love can be beautiful yet unenduring. Ultimately, he has to survive a shattering act of human sacrifice that kills what he loves most and brands him with guilt he can never expunge. Scathingly funny and heartbreakingly real, totally unsentimental yet deeply moving, Things to Be Lost is wired with the on-the-edge rhythms of today in counterpoint with the age-old pulsing of the human heart. It is a triumph of African-American authenticity and literary artistry.The tragic killing of a father by his 12-year-old son lies at the heart of this stunning new novel by the author of Getting Right with God. In this compelling exploration of the dynamics of an African-American family, Newton writes with tenderness and sadness, hope and irony, of the shaken but enduring dreams of a once all-American family.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The disintegration of a middle-class African American family is the focus of Newton's second novel, a first-rate follow-up to his debut work, Getting Right with God. Narrator Randall Roberts is a rising young painter with a terrible secret: he killed his father when he was 12. Because his family covered up by claiming that the death was self-inflicted, Randall never served time; his punishment has been psychic rather than judicial. Outwardly, as we learn through the extensive flashbacks that comprise most of the novel, the Roberts family had seemed ideal. ``Ma'' was a community activist and educator, involved in a number of important causes, while ``Dad,'' to whom Randall was devoted, was a deacon at their local church. The trouble began when Dad started to spend increasing amounts of time alone in their attic, writing wild religious ramblings he claimed were inspired directly by God. From then, the family rode a downward spiral. Randall's sister fell in with a bad crowd and committed a savage act of violence; Ma, pushed by Dad, lost her moral compass; and, finally, Randall took his father's life, destroying the family unit in order to save it. In another's hands, all this could be relentlessly depressing, but Newton tells his tale in spritely prose, with a light hand and much humor, evincing a fine ear for dialogue. In the process, he accomplishes what Nabokov did for pedophilia in Lolita, making a patricide an understandable act with which readers can empathize, if not wholly approve. (Feb.)Book Details
Published
June 13, 1996
Publisher
Penguin
Pages
276
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780452271487