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Angela Flournoy's critically celebrated first novel, set in Detroit, came out last April.
Angela Flournoy's novel-writing debut, which made a splash last spring, earns new attention on a prestigious year-end list.
"The Turner House" is among "100 Notable Books of 2015" listed in The New York Times' weekly book review supplement.
Sunday Book Review section cover of The New York Times. (Illustration by Joao Fazenda)
In a Times review April 29, here's part of what novelist Matthew Thomas writes:
Flournoy recounts the history of Detroit with more sensitivity than any textbook could. Dissatisfactions with social conditions boiled over in the summer of 1967 into a civil disturbance that Flournoy avoids labeling a '“riot” as it’s taking place. Instead, she writes that “the skirmish on 12th and Clairmont had morphed into something larger” as “a burning house became an olfactory norm akin to skunk spray.”
Cha-Cha, who has moved out of the family home by then, imagines “he might have joined his own friends from the neighborhood in search of new shoes, lightweight appliances, anything with resale potential” if he had no younger siblings to worry about, but the fact is, he’s back at the house many an evening for a home-cooked meal and to make sure his teenage brothers stay indoors until their father gets home from work.
Six other review excerpts and a half-dozen paragraphs from the book are below in a repost from our site six months ago.
The 30-year-old author, who lives in Washington, D.C., came here for publication month readings at the Scarab Club in the Cultural Center and Pages Bookshop in northwest Derroit.
Shinola sponsors a 90-minute evening presentation Dec. 14 at its New York store in the TeriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Flournoy and poet Casey Rocheteau, living here as the first Write A House winner, will discuss "Detroit as a literary inspiration."
Earlier article (May 17, 2015):
Angela Flournoy's widely praised debut novel, "The Turner House," is set mainly on Detroit's east side -- an area she visited with her father Marvin Bernard Flournoy, a musician raised there as one of 13 children in a home now abandoned to squatters. "I used it as a jumping-off point," she says in a Los Angeles Times interview.
Her background and a literary gap in certain stories of this city led Flournoy to craft a four-generation saga of a family that also has 13 children, she tells Miriam Grossman of Kirkus Reviews:
“There are very specific things that happened to the black population in Detroit that have never really been written about in fiction. I wanted to show the place and the people who live there are not just a sum of crime statistics or per capita income.
"People still have happy lives, people still have very proud lives. Detroit is a very proud city.”
The 352-page hardback, published five weeks ago by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, explores what unfolds when the widowed Viola Turner, the family's Alabama-born matriarch, has to leave her 3.5-room brick house on fictional Yarrow Street.. The Turners discover that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage, so the children gather to decide the fate of their home in an evolving city.
The author, who grew up in Los Angeles area where he mother still lives, outlines this behind-the-book incubation process in the conversation with LA Times writer Jasmine Elist:.
I’m interested in: How did we get here? How do you get to a place where you have three operable houses on a block that used to be full of houses? How did we get there? . . .
I also know, for my family in particular, that house served its purpose, as far as everyone made it out of the house and they’re all upstanding citizens and successful human beings. It served its purpose as far as shelter. In an ideal world, it would have been able to do that for more generations than it did.
Part of me is also just indignant. The last time I went there in October was the first time that I could tell there were squatters in the house. So basically it was the last insult to me.
The 352-page hardback also is available as an e-book.
Book excerpt
Below is a sample of how Flournoy's questions, indignation and imagination shape a narrative recommended by Oprah Winfrey and dozens of reviewers. These portions, from a section set in spring 2008 and a chapter titled "Swelling Bellies and Wedding Tulle," focus on the youngest Turner sibling -- Lelah, a homeless gambling addict who just turned 40:
At her mother's vacant house, [Lelah] claimed the big room for sleeping. . . .
The big room was not, in actuality, very big. Could hardly be considered a room. For some other family it might have made a decent storage closet, or a mother's cramped sewing room. For the Turners it became the only single-occupancy bedroom in their overcrowded house. A rare and coveted space.
The porch light had been on when she drove up, which meant Cha-Cha still paid the electricity bill. A relief. A house with electricity couldn't be classified as abandoned, and an individual with a key to that house didn't fit the description of a trespasser. . . .
The [big room's] lone window faced the street, which in this part of the city -- ever changed, further decayed between each visit -- put Lelah at risk of being struck by a stray bullet, or kept awake by intermittent car horns, hoots hollers and alley cat screeches. But on this, the first real, spring-feeling night of the season, she thought people had better things to do than shoot up the old Turner house, and having lived here in the eighties when the final, fatal arrival of crack sowed the neighborhood, Lelah felt Yarrow Street had already given her its worst. . . .
Dozens of brown outlines on the yellow wallpaper -- ovals and rectangles -- highlighted where picture frames once hung. Not long ago, every descendant of Francis and Viola Turner smiled from the front room's walls. Four generations, nearly one hundred faces. Some afro'd, some Jheri curled, some bald, more balding. Mortarboards, nurses' scrubs, swelling bellies and wedding tulle. A depression in the floorboards opposite the front door marked the spot where Viola's armchair had stood. Lelah had spent whole afternoons on the floor in front of that chair, watching the comings and goings of Yarrow Street as her mother or an older sister greased her scalp and combed her hair. The memory made her feel safe for a moment, like maybe she'd made the right choice coming back here.
A rash of dandelions pocked the east side with yellow. The newly arrived spring -- the spots of color, the surprise of birdsong -- gave the neighborhood a tumbledown, romantic quality. It reassured Lelah that the ghetto could still hold beauty, and that streets with this much new life could still have good in them. On both sides of the Turner house, vacant lots were stippled with new grass. Some ragweed, wood sorrel and violets would surround the crumbling foundations, the houses long burned and rained away. The Turner house, originally three lots into the block, had become a corner house in recent years, its slight mint and brick frame the most reliable landmark on the street.
© 2015, Angela Flournoy
Google Books has a preview of more pages here.
The author at Pages Bookshop, on West Grand River Avenue in Detroit's Grandmont-Rosedale area, where she read and signed books April 30. (Photo by Susan Murphy)
Review excerpts
Several of these selections show reactions to the new novel's sense of Detroit:
► "Detroit looms large:" They're bound together by the crumbling city in which that house somehow survives. Detroit looms large in this novel, as a hulking version of the Turner homestead that poses the same question confronting the Turners themselves: For all our past failures and disappointments, can we be more than the ruins we all eventually resemble? . . . Do we, against the evidence, still dare to hope?
"Why not give in to every impulse, break free and go insane, if he lived in a world where people made structures disappear overnight?" So asks the beleaguered Cha-Cha as he discovers that a vandal has dismantled the garage of the Turner's Detroit home, selling it for scrap. -- Mike Fiscer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (a native Detroiter)
► White reader "felt at home:" The greatest testament to the skill of a writer is the ability to make what might seem alien to the reader completely recognizable and utterly engaging. Such was my experience reading 'The Turner House.' Mine is a tiny white family from a small town with no sense of heritage, yet every moment I spent with the Turners -- a family of 13 children shaped by the Great Migration to Detroit -- I felt at home. Their struggles and joys are universal. -- Kim Fox, Grand Rapids bookstore manager at American Booksellers Association
► Faygo and Better Made: Michigan comes through every precisely rendered detail, from the Faygo soda and Better Made chips to the neighborhoods where enterprising thieves will lift entire garages off their foundations for the scrap metal. . . .
Flournoy also includes Detroit in its bustling heyday of the 1940s, when Francis Turner arrived from Arkansas with a lukewarm letter of introduction and not much else, and the riots of 1967, which permanently marked the city and its residents. -- Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor
► "Far from ruin porn:" I grew up in a suburb of Detroit and my family still lives in the area, so I felt a natural pull toward the writing about the city, which is featured prominently in "The Turner House." Flournoy is able to weave Detroit’s history, mood and structure into her story like an additional character. Far from the ruin porn of crumbling images, here the descriptions tell of transformations — not just of buildings, but the people themselves. -- Shannon, River City Reading blog (Richmond, Va.)
► Racial barriers: The story of black Americans of the elder Turners’ generation is the Great Migration north after slavery during Jim Crow; the white flight from the cities where the new blacks settled; and, most damagingly, the shutting out of resources to those newly black areas, cutting their chances of success. -- Hope Wabuke, The Root
► "Black working-class homeowners:" In its prime, Yarrow Street was a comfortable haven for black working-class homeowners. -- Publishers Weekly
