MADreads

Them

December 29th, 2007 Liz - Central Library

What happens when a poor, African-American neighborhood becomes attractive to whites because it is convenient to downtown (or convenient to another place whites are interested in?) Urban planners call it gentrification.  Some journalists call the whites pioneers.  Sometimes the affected African-Americans call their new neighbors something far less flattering.  It hasn’t happened in Madison to the degree it has elsewhere…but its been a huge issue in our nearby Chicago and in Nathan McCall’s Atlanta.

In his first fiction book, Them, McCall has chosen a neighborhood he’s very familiar with– Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward–and tracks the changes to individuals and the neighborhood as whites slowly move in.

What makes this book so good is the non-cardboard way McCall has crafted the characters–from Sandy and Sean, the ‘pioneer’ white couple that moves in next door, to Barlowe, their African-American, nearly middle-aged, anti-establishment neighbor.

The dialogue is so realistic it seems as if McCall has eavesdropped in the Old Fourth Ward’s mini-mart turned coffee shop.  The ‘resolution’ to the plot is frustratingly realistic in the way nothing is really resolved.  Read this book for the bigger issues, though, as by inventing a fictional world that very closely mirrors the way contemporary urban life is changing, McCall offers an insider’s perspective that is complicated and thought provoking.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction