The View from Here

Set in an environment of casual prejudice and commonplace poverty, the story of a gentle, hardworking wife and mother, Anna Thomas, follows her endeavors to overcome a challenge that could destroy her family

The view is from the womb in Jackson's extraordinary debut, most of which is narrated by L'il Lisa, who begins speaking to us five months into her mother Anna's pregnancy. (Readers may be reminded of Kate Atkinson's The View from the Museum.) Taking place over the course of four months in the 1950s, the action centers around an African American family isolated among the corn fields of rural Mississippi. Well before her birth, Lisa knows her brooding, domineering father, J.T., won't allow Anna to keep the baby. With five sons already, J.T. can't handle another mouth to feed and has arranged to give the child to Clariece, his barren older sister, to rear. Clariece is pretentious, verbally and physically abusive, belittling and dishonest. Himself raised by Clariece, T.J. has been so thoroughly demeaned by her that he can't recognize her poisonous character. Anna wants to keep Lisa and has faith that J.T. will come to his senses when his only daughter is born. In addition to Lisa's narrative, Jackson threads poignant fragments of unmailed letters written by Anna during her lonely pregnancy to her devoted childhood friend Ida Mae, who has gone north and for whom Anna has no address. He also includes occasional third-person passages which offer an omniscient perspective on Anna, Ida Mae and J.T. from their youth up through Lisa's dramatic birth. Jackson orchestrates the three viewpoints like a skilled composer, engaging the reader intellectually and emotionally. His descriptions are understated but evocative, his dialogue natural and true to period regional idiom. A formidable craftsman and exceptionally gifted storyteller, he has written a haunting story.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cleanly written debut that begins modestly enough, with a simplicity worthy of a YA audience, but loses its way once Jackson's preacherly instincts take over and his characters become object lessons in righteous behavior. As some sort of homage, Jackson sets his novel in the small Mississippi town of Eudora in Welty country, but it's more like the town of Alice, as in Walker. Lest he be charged with a vision of relentless black violence toward women, Jackson has his main character repent his ways and includes a shrew of witchlike proportions. The story is plain enough: Covering the nine months before the narrator's birth, the tale flashes back to her mother's courtship and marriage to one Joseph Henry Thomas, a hard-working illiterate who considers his wife and four children his property and rules the roost with an iron hand--and with a toughness penetrated only by his older sister, Clariece, a mean and pretentious old cow married to a preacher. Clariece certainly lords over Joseph's wife, Anna, the sweet and understanding center of this family saga. Without consulting her, Joseph promises his sixth child, the narrator, to his childless sister, an act that begins the rough times. For, in short order, Joseph loses his job, Anna's best friend dies, and Joseph takes up with the bottle. But the memory of Ida Mae, her wild and sassy friend, helps Anna through the crisis; in letters addressed to Ida Mae interspersed throughout the novel, Anna builds the courage to confront her cruel husband and his brutal sister. In Anna's moment of strength, Jackson provides the chest-thumping moral: ``. . . women are the bearers of life, [and] we also provide the strength that makes life worth living.'' The down-home parable-making here is undermined by all the pop psych, making this, sadly, a perfect contender for the latest in black schmaltz. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A black family is in crisis in this literary debut. Anna Thomas is the strong center of her family of husband Joseph and their five sons. Sustained by the solid upbringing of her late widowed mother and the lifelong, long-distance friendship of Ida Mae Ramsey, Anna perseveres--through another pregnancy (she talks to unborn "li'l Lisa," though Joe says the child will be given to his childless sister, Clariece), through loss of jobs, through domestic abuse, and through untimely death. This novel, set in rural Mississippi, is marred by some stereotypical characters--such as the foolhardy black girl who goes north at her peril and the out-of-work, liquored-up black man--and by some moralizing, but it also shows warmly realistic relationships between mother and daughter and female friends and confronts the issue of abuse passed from generation to generation. And Anna herself, loving toward family and friends but ferocious in defense of her children, is worth knowing. A good first effort. Michele Leber