1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Long Distance Life (1989)
by Marita Golden
Washington DC (Northeast)
Washington DC: 2/12
Long Distance Life is another good example of the benefits of doing this kind of list-based reading. It's a really good novel about the African-American experience in Washington DC, and almost certainly a book I would never have read or even heard about were it not for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Long Distance Life is plot type 2, family saga. It starts out with the matriarch of the family, Naomi Reeves, who leaves behind her sharecropper husband in North Carolina for a shot at something else in 1920's Washington DC. She quickly manages to parlay work as a housecleaner into a small empire of rental properties. She falls in love with a Marcus Garvey loving school teacher and they have a daughter, Esther.
Esther, of course, makes a series of what look like obviously terrible life choices: Dropping out of Howard University in favor of having a child with a married man. Most of the book involves mother-Naomi picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Esther's bad choice, and the impact that choice has on her two children, Logan, her first child and Nathaniel, the child she has with the same man after she works through her issues by volunteering as a Civil Rights worker in the deep south.
Golden's portrayal of African American life over the decades in Washington DC is lucid and clear. She doesn't advocate or criticize her character's choices, preferring to let the narrative speak for itself. Long Distance Life is a small gem of a book.
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