The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Feast of All Saints (1979)

by Anne Rice

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 19/28

  Like Stephen King, Anne Rice hit career gold with her first published novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976) but there was an eight year gap between it and The Vampire Lestat, the first of 12(!) sequels that I didn't realize were published as late as 2018.   I imagine in the period between 1976 and 1985 Rice was trying to not be pigeonholed as a one trick pony, failed, and then spent the rest of her light pooping out crap to pay for her San Francisco mansion.  The Feast of All Saints reads like Interview but with the free people of color at the center instead of Vampires.  Like the Grandissimes, Rice is writing this book from the perspective of someone who is not herself related to any free people of color.  Her plot is confusing and hard to follow, with at least a half dozen major characters and dozens of minor characters spread out over several interrelated clans. 

  Marcel, the child of a French trader and rescued Haitian woman, yearns to leave New Orleans for the fairer environs of Paris, which lacks the entrenched racism of the nascent American order.  He falls under the spell of Christophe, a writer who has returned to New Orleans after finding literary success abroad. Each male protagonist is surrounded by a suite of females: mothers and sisters, while a ring of predatory white men rings each female character. African American men appear only as slaves.   Like all of the novels set in early 19th century New Orleans, it is impossible to ignore how deadly a place it was before medicine got a grip on yellow fever and malaria.  People died every year in the hundreds.  It was brutal.

Nonesuch (2026) by Francis Spufford

 Audiobook Review

Nonesuch (2026)

by Francis Spufford

    I really enjoyed English author Francis Spufford's last book, Cahokia Jazz, an alt-history work of detective fiction where Native Americans survived and evolved in parallel with Euro-Americans in the Midwest.  I really, really loved the alt-history part of Cahokia Jazz whereas the actual story was a pretty straightforward take on detective fiction.  Here, my preferences swung in the other direction, I wasn't wowed by the scenario, but I found the actual plot and characters interesting.   In Nonesuch, Spufford has moved back to the UK, where he finds his protagonist, Iris Hawkins, staring down the barrel of World War II.  Hawkins is a self-described "Suburban Slut," and a second generation "City" girl, where she works for a stockbroker of the Jewish persuasion and dreams of achieving financial success as a female stockbroker (literally illegal in that time and place.)   

    One night she ditches her date and finds herself at an avant-garde film party where one-reel art films are played over phonographic records.   There, she meets her romantic interest, Geoff, a technician in the nascent television department of the BBC as well as her nemesis, Lady LaLage Cunningham, a British Aristo Fascist.   The plot involves the occult, and an attempt by the British Fascist movement to travel back in time and prevent England from coming into the war against the Nazi's.   Along the way she learns about her feelings and has a decent amount of lit fic sex- Spufford must have been keeping tabs on the romantasy trend, because there was exactly zero sex in Cahokia Jazz.

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life(1880) by George Washington Cable

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)

 by George Washington Cable 

New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana: 18/28

  I thought there would be more 19th century American literature in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America but thus far it hasn't been the case.  The Grandissimes is the only 19th century title in this entire Chapter and I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single 19th century book in the prior chapter.   The preface to this edition calls The Grandissimes "the first modern southern novel," thought they can only mean that it is the first modern by novel BY rather than ABOUT the south, since Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and is certainly "about" the south.   The Grandissimes, set in the beginning of the 19th century (before New Orleans was an American city) is named after a local family with a white part and a "F.M.O.C" or "free man of color" part. Cable uses the conventions of 18th century gothic fiction- masked balls, confusing correspondence to heighten the drama of conflict between the white Grandissime and the colored one through the deployment of various proxies- a newly arrived white pharmacist, a creole voodoo priestess.  It is, to be honest, confusing and reminded me again about how fiction influenced by 18th century fiction and early 19th century fiction can feel "post-modern" when it is actually "pre-modern." 

   This is the first 19th century American novel I've read in some time, and I suppose the knock on second-tier semi-classics like this one is that they are too derivative of their inspirations.  Here, it's hard to find anything that doesn't seem directly lifted from Sir Walter Scott.