“The Good Lord Bird” by James McBride
I didn’t finish James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, the book that won the 2014 Morning News Tournament of Books till after it won the ToB and then some other big award, I forget which one (The National Book Award). I’d borrowed the book from the library and it was due before I was to leave on Spring Break when I was about 80 pages from the end. I conscientiously returned it to the library for the next patron–you’re welcome, whoever you are–and figured I would either buy it on the trip, or hang out at a bookstore for a while and finish it. I ended up feeling like a deadbeat because I went to the bookstore TWICE to finish it, and should have just bought it, but was feeling mulish about it for whatever reason, and did not.
McBride’s book is outlandish historical fiction about a young black boy slave mistaken for a girl who is adopted into the company of John Brown, the Kansas abolitionist. The character of John Brown leapt off the page, sometimes horrifying, sometimes delightful, always fascinating.
He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.
McBride goes on a fanciful, but also dead serious, tour of a point in history I knew little about. The level of satire at times was astonishing. McBride’s portrayal of Frederick Douglass raised a lot of critical eyebrows. And yet it was this daring, and the truths the fictional portrayals pointed at, that kept me wrapped up in the story till the end. And now that I’ve written this, I feel even worse about not buying the book, as this one is certainly worth owning, and re-reading.
Postscript: I just remembered one of the big reasons I didn’t want to buy the book was because I’d brought Eleanor Catton’s doorstop, The Luminaries, along with me to read next, and couldn’t justify adding a book I was nearly finished with to my cross-country luggage. And, I am not a fan of e-readers, even if they do seem idea for this situation.