Magic Time: A Novel - Hardcover

Marlette, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374200017 ISBN 13: 9780374200015

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

A prize-winning Southern master storyteller weaves a riveting tale of love, mystery and justice

 

When the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Doug Marlette last turned to fiction, Valerie Sayers rejoiced in The Washington Post Book World: “The Bridge [is] a great story—exuberant, proud, myth-challenging—and Marlette has a great, Dickensian time with the telling.” Pat Conroy saluted The Bridge as the finest first novel to come out of North Carolina since Look Homeward, Angel. Studs Turkel called it “enthralling.” Kaye Gibbons marveled at its “extraordinary grace [and] humor.” And the Southeast Booksellers Association gave The Bridge the 2002 Book Award for Fiction.




 

Marlette’s new novel, Magic Time, is a spellbinding stew of history, murder, courtroom drama, humor, love, betrayal, and justice. Moving between New York City and the New South of the early 1990s, with flashbacks to Mississippi’s cataclysmic Freedom Summer of 1964, Magic Time tells the story of New York newspaper columnist Carter Ransom, a son of Mississippi, who had the great fortune and terrible luck of falling in love that summer of ‘64 with a New York–born civil rights worker who wound up being killed alongside three coworkers. Carter’s father, the local judge, presided over the first trial of the murders. But now there’s evidence that the original trial was flawed, even fraudulent. And the question, among many others, is whether the good judge was knowingly involved in a cover-up.

 

Magic Time is that rare thing: a page-turner whose driving plot line is matched by the depth of its moral vision.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Marlette has won every major prize for editorial cartooning, including the Pulitzer. His first novel, The Bridge, was voted 2002 Best Book of the Year in Fiction by the Southeast Booksellers Association.

Reviews

When a terrorist group bombs a Manhattan museum, New York Examiner columnist Carter Ransom suffers an emotional breakdown and returns to his Mississippi hometown, Troy, to convalesce. Carter's father, Judge Ransom, has just retired after 40 years on the bench there; his most famous case was presiding over Troy's national disgrace: the Shiloh Church bombing, in which four civil rights activists died in 1965. At the time, Carter was a local rookie journalist who met and fell in love with Sarah Solomon, one of the volunteers who died. One man was convicted, but the instigator, Samuel Bohanon, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, went free. Now, as Carter begins to understand that he has never fully come to terms with Sarah's death, an ambitious young state attorney is reopening the Shiloh Church bombing case—and she's going after Bohanon, along with anyone who stands in her way, including Carter's father, who, rumors say, threw the first trial to spare Sam. While this capacious second novel by Pulitzer Prize–winning Kudzu cartoonist Marlette (The Bridge) doesn't travel any new turf (and despite the over-the-top climax), the author writes of the South with such affection that the novel becomes one of those stories a reader doesn't mind revisiting. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Marlette fulfills the literary promise of his debut novel, The Bridge (2002), with a panoramic saga that revisits an ignominious chapter in Mississippi history. A terrorist bombing in New York City during the 1990s plummets outspoken newspaper columnist Carter Ransom into a paralyzing depression, forcing him to return home to the small southern town where, as an impressionable college student, he fell in love with Sarah Solomon, a civil rights volunteer who was among several workers killed in a Klan-instigated church bombing during the freedom summer of 1964. All local men, the murderers were brought to trial before Carter's father, a conservative judge who may have covered up information, thus allowing the mastermind to go free. With the surfacing of new evidence, Carter must confront painful memories as he determines who his father was protecting and why. A tenacious legal thriller, touching remembrance-of-youth novel, and spicy love story rolled into one, Marlette's majestic and detailed second offering communicates the assured finesse of a seasoned author. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Troy


Carter ransom awoke curled up in the backseat of his sister’s Mercury Grand Marquis. The metronomic ticking of tires against scored pavement penetrated the pharmaceutical fog, and he pushed up on his forearms to look out the window. They were speeding along the interstate that flatlined across the Black Belt of southern Mississippi.
 
            “You slept good,” said Sally. He caught her anxious glance in the rearview mirror. He raised himself up until he could see his own reflection. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his jawline was shadowed with stubble, his thick brown hair matted. He still had on the black and gold Vanderbilt sweatshirt his sister had found in a chest of drawers in his apartment in New York and brought to the hospital for him to wear on the trip. It was a present Emily had gotten him for his birthday.
 
            “How close are we?” Carter asked.
 
            “Just north of Meridian,” said Sally. “We’re almost home. Go back to sleep if you want.”
 
            He stretched and looked around. One leg was still numb, and his back muscles were tight from the long ride south. He felt thirsty but was too weak to open the ice chest on the floorboard beside him to see if there were Cokes inside. Instead he retrieved the pillow he had been resting his head on, gathered it up close to his chest, and sank into the backseat vinyl to stare out the window. The medication made his throat dry and his brain furry. Nausea overcame him as a profound agitation blossomed again in his stomach.
 
            “Sally, what’s going on?” he said. He leaned forward and placed his forehead against the seat back, turning slightly to squint through the glare of the side window at the barren Mississippi landscape whizzing by.
 
            “You passed out in the newsroom, remember?” Sally spoke in a conscientiously neutral tone, as if she were describing the weather.
 
            Carter stared out at the scrub pine, the red clay, and the heavy equipment of highway construction, trying to focus on what his sister was saying.
 
            “You were in the hospital a few days but checked yourself out. Your editor, Mr. Dennehy, offered you some time off, but you insisted on returning to work.” Carter had not missed a deadline for a couple of weeks. Then, Sally explained, one day he did not show up for work or answer the phone. His colleague Gelman found his bicycle unlocked on the stoop. When Gelman’s knock on the door got no answer, he called a couple of his police buddies and they broke in. “They found you passed out on the floor in your bedroom and took you back to the hospital,” Sally said. “The doctor said it was nervous exhaustion and malnutrition.” She hesitated. “He also mentioned symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
 
            Carter looked back into the rearview mirror, knowing his sister would be watching for his reaction. He felt a jab of indignation. “Fuck that,” he said under his breath. The thought that his condition might have a diagnosis made him feel even worse.
 
When he surfaced again from a dreamless highway slumber, the car was stopped at a gas station. He could see Sally inside paying. She returned with some peanuts and Nabs and seemed grateful when he tore them open. Back on the road, Carter sipped a Coke and looked out on the increasingly familiar landscape. He sat up fully for the first time. “This is a bad idea, Sally.”
 
            “You don’t need to be by yourself, Carter,” Sally said with a quiet finality.
 
            “You should have left me in the loony bin,” he said.
 
            Sally said, “Ashland is not a loony bin.”
 
            “You’re right. Troy is the loony bin.”
 
            The last time Carter had been back to his hometown of Troy, Mississippi, was a couple of years earlier, when he had taken Josh and Emily on the grand Southern tour. They spent one night in Troy. Carter had seldom returned since his mother died ten years before and he had left the Atlanta paper and moved to New York. On the rare occasions he visited, he had calculated to a science the length of time he and his father could spend under the same roof. Forty-eight hours, max, before one of them uttered the words I have to take a walk.
 
            “You need to rest, Carter. You need to be around people who love you and can take care of you.”
 
            “But I’ve got a life, Sal. Responsibilities. I’ve got deadlines—”
 
            “Dennehy said he could manage without you for a while.”
 
            As much as Carter cringed at the thought of recuperating in Troy, he knew that once Sally had set a plan in motion, she saw it through. She offered him a bit of her Hershey bar.
 
            “Daddy’s excited you’re coming, Pross,” Sally said. Pross, short for Prosecutor, was a pet name his father called him when he was a boy. The name remained current among only a handful of people.
 
            “How is the judge?”
 
            “Not bad for a seventy-year-old.” Since retiring from the federal bench for health reasons, their father had rallied and returned to his law practice. “The firm’s having a fortieth anniversary party in a few weeks,” Sally said. “Don’t tell Daddy, but the new connector’s going to be named after him. The Mitchell T. Ransom Expressway.”
 
            “What is it, a dead end?”
 
            Sally laughed. “You can come to the party if you feel up to it.”
 
            Carter forced a smile. “I don’t know how you take care of him.”
 
            “Oh, he’s no bother. He’s dialed it back a lot in recent years. You’ll be surprised. He’s a good grandfather to Willie, and Willie’s devoted to him.” Sally’s ex, a tax lawyer, had run off with his paralegal when Sally was pregnant with their now six-year-old son. “Besides,” she continued, “when you’re a bookseller in a town that doesn’t read, having no house payment is a godsend.”
 
            “Thought of hiring a nurse?”
 
            “Oh, Mr. Primary Caregiver’s offering advice now.”
 
            Sally had turned on her signal and was moving into the right lane. Carter felt an involuntary pang of love/hate when he saw the green exit sign, troy historic district.
 
            “How’s business, Sally?” He knew how hard it was for her to be away from the shop. And although she would never complain, he felt guilty for being the reason she had to take off.
 
            “Could be worse. The town’s changed considerably. You’re not going to recognize it.”
 
            “That’s reassuring.”
 
            “The college is Troy University now, you know. Our generation’s finally grown up and taken over. The mayor’s black, and a couple of council members. There’s even an artists’ collective in Troy.”
 
            “Black-velvet Elvises? Popsicle-stick birdhouses?”
 
            “Ha-ha. There’s also a clique of writers developing.”
 
            “Ah, Mississippi. Where they write more books than they read.”
 
            The conversation had exhausted Carter. He reclined in the seat. Sally had turned off the interstate onto old U.S. Highway 17, the narrow two-lane blacktop that was the only route north out of town in his youth, before ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374200017
• ISBN 13: 9780374200015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 496