The Untelling - Hardcover

Jones, Tayari

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446532460 ISBN 13: 9780446532464

Publisher: Warner Books, 2005

Synopsis

After dealing with the loss of her father and sister fifteen years ago, twenty-five-year-old Aria attempts to reinvent herself through marriage and beginning a family of her own, only to find that she must deal with the past before she can look to the future.

About this title

About the Author

Tayari Jones is an English professor at the University of Illinois.

Reviews

Adult/High School–When nine-year-old Ariadne Jackson loses her father and baby sister in an auto accident, her life in a black middle-class Atlanta neighborhood changes forever. Her eccentric mother grows more erratic, locking Aria and her surviving sister, Hermione, out of the house on Halloween or serving them raw chicken as a punishment for bad behavior. These little cruelties push Hermione to distance herself from the family, leaving Ariadne to fend for herself. Years later, at 25, Aria believes she has surmounted the traumas of her youth, until she thinks she is pregnant but instead finds that she is infertile. Her life becomes layered with lies and half-truths as she fears she will lose the promise of family and a normal life. It is the untelling of these tales that leads her finally to accept the odd turns a life may take. Teens will appreciate Ariadne's dilemma as she wrestles first with the implications of a child out-of-wedlock and then the more difficult truth that she will never bear her own children. They will also understand how she must unravel the untruths she has told, just as her namesake in Greek mythology unrolled a length of string to rescue her lover from a deadly maze.–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The story of Tayari Jones's new novel, The Untelling, is a deceptively simple one: A young woman discovers she's infertile just as she meets the man of her dreams. This might be a disappointing premise for a novel, too small to engage our sensibilities in any significant way, too confined to its small, solipsistic corner of the universe. But The Untelling widens and deepens as it goes, becoming not just the story of one woman's regret -- but a shrewd and knowing portrait of poverty, racism and the hopelessness of the oppressed and the unlucky. In the end, it is very much about what human beings do when the world turns its back on them.

The novel begins with a tragedy. Ariadne Jackson -- or Aria, as she is known -- is 10 years old when her father and her baby sister, Genevieve, are killed in a car accident. Aria, her older sister, Hermione, and their mother, Eloise, are also in the car that day, but they are spared, a blessing that continues to haunt each of them over the years. The car accident, which occurs 15 years before the present-day events of the novel, is confined to a brief prologue that ends with the sort of lyrical detail that appears from time to time in the novel like the proverbial rare flower struggling up out of a cracked city sidewalk. As Aria is driven away from the scene of the accident in a friend's car, she looks back "at the pretty dogwood trees that lined the road, staring at the bloody blossoms clustered on the gnarled branches like a hundred dying butterflies."

The lyricism of The Untelling is not generally of this pastoral sort -- the novel's world is too urban, too impoverished, too realistic for that -- but it arises out of the same acute awareness of detail. Jones is a keen guide through the novel's universe of the black middle-class neighborhoods and decrepit slums of Atlanta, and her descriptions, like this one, have an almost tender quality: "Lincoln and Genevieve Jackson are buried in Westview Cemetery, five gorgeous acres of grief," Aria says. "Although the cemetery is opulent, the neighborhood around it is decayed and rotting. I would never be willing to live over here. People like [her new boyfriend] Dwayne think that all depressed areas are the same, but anybody who lives in a less-than-desirable zip code can tell you different. This stretch of MLK, just before it branches off to Abernathy, near the Marta station -- this mile or two really has nothing to offer anyone. . . . Even if you were to raze the buildings -- the crumbling apartment buildings with No Trespassing signs, those condemned homes in which people live anyway, people with children -- even if these structures were leveled, it wouldn't be right to build on this land. The sadness permeates the soil like nuclear waste."

The sadness of poverty, especially the sadness of the poor black population of Atlanta, is both personal and political. The Jacksons are sad because two of them were shorn away in a car wreck -- "Don't tell me about sad," Eloise warns her daughters, who venture their sympathy for the ruined neighborhoods around the cemetery when the three women drive past. "I know all about sad." But nearly everyone in the novel, even the unnamed people who drive past on the street, is unfortunate. Neon signs on the street corners advertise "Best Buy Caskets," Aria observes, "to get the attention of people of the neighborhood who would need both discounts and coffins." That state of affairs -- the ineluctable realities, especially for poor African Americans, of death and poverty, with everything in between being a mighty struggle -- is like the scenery drawn across the proscenium stage of the novel's events, and it is impossible to forget. "Who are you to tell us what we should be grateful for, what should make us content?" Eloise demands of the self-assured black doctor who examines Aria and confirms that she is infertile; at that moment, we're squarely on Eloise's side: The Jacksons have every right to be mad.

Even the novel's minor characters are reminders of what a life of deprivation looks like. Cynthia, the crack addict who prowls Aria's neighborhood and one day breaks into the apartment Aria and her friend Rochelle share, is both criminal and judge, accuser and accused. "Why you act so biggity?" she taunts Aria. "You don't have nothing, besides that diamond on your hand. Y'all don't even have a couch." Aria, whose good fortune with Dwayne feels both precious and precarious, is horrified by Cynthia and what she seems to know. "What do you want?" she whispers. And Cynthia, of course, tells her, "I want what everybody wants."

Aria's job as a teacher with a literacy organization puts her in contact with a steady stream of unfortunates, including Keisha, who is 17, pregnant and desperate. Keisha's story is like that of the many young girls -- foolish, helpless victims heaped with enough burdens to bury even the toughest survivor -- who come into Aria's life. The novel, too, might sink under the dead weight of so much misfortune, but Aria's gift -- her grace -- is to be clear-eyed enough to see not only the sadness around her but also what is worth loving. Jones has made Aria a careful witness to her own life and the lives of those around her; her observations, sometimes wry, sometimes poignant, always honest, inflate the novel with hope, sending it soaring over its wasteland of woes. In the end, despite every obstacle, Aria has managed to acquire both dignity and sympathy, and The Untelling has worked a most improbable and most welcome charm.

Reviewed by Carrie Brown
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

The legacy of a fatal accident haunts surviving family members in Jones's deep-felt second novel (after Leaving Atlanta). As a young girl, native Atlantan Aria Jackson lost her father and baby sister in a car accident; her inability to comfort her dying father, and her mother's failed effort to save the baby, have damaged their relationship. After graduating from Spelman, Aria goes to work at a local literacy center, where she is drawn to outspoken Keisha Evers, a young teen pregnant with her second child. When Aria believes she is pregnant, she confides in Keisha before sharing the news with her fiancé, Dwayne. But when mysterious cramping sends her to the doctor, Aria learns that she is not pregnant but instead experiencing very early menopause. Reluctant to tell Dwayne the truth, Aria claims to have lost the baby. Dwayne's desire for a child remains strong, and Aria watches with growing envy as Keisha's pregnancy progresses. When a second doctor confirms Aria's condition, she is forced to make difficult choices with the shadow of her past looming over her. The first-person narration is convincing and genuine, and Jones handles her material with sensitivity and sympathy. This strong sophomore effort will bolster her reputation. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Jackson family were on their way to a dance recital when the father swerved to avoid hitting another car. Instead, he hit a tree and slowly died behind the wheel of the car, with 10-year-old Aria seated behind him. The baby sister is also killed. The survivors--Aria, Hermione (five years older), and the mother--will live the rest of their lives shattered by the accident. At 25, Aria is unsure about life. Her work as a literacy instructor is fulfilling, but she cannot seem to build the emotional attachments that are needed to sustain a courtship and start a family--until she meets Dwayne. But her struggle with guilt and her secrecy threaten whatever promise there may be in the relationship. Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta (2002), offers a delicate portrait of a young woman's emotional fragility as she attempts to get over the greatest trauma of her life. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Warner Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446532460
• ISBN 13: 9780446532464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336