{"id":2190,"date":"2018-08-29T21:42:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T01:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/?p=2190"},"modified":"2018-08-29T22:04:30","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T02:04:30","slug":"1959-davis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/1959-davis\/","title":{"rendered":"1959 by Thulani Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

1959<\/i>\u00a0is a novel by\u00a0Thulani Davis<\/a>\u00a0that was published in 2001 by\u00a0Grove Press. It is a first-person\u00a0coming-of-age\u00a0narrative that chronicles a young black girl named Willie Tarrant coping with\u00a0adolescence\u00a0and tensions over\u00a0desegregation\u00a0in Turner, Virginia. It’s also a fictional chronicle of how Willie’s community is transformed by the\u00a0civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

I was interested to read the novel because it speaks to an\u00a0African-American\u00a0experience in an\u00a0era\u00a0that I have little knowledge of. One of the things I wrestled with a bit creatively while I was writing my forthcoming novel The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul<\/em> is the issue of\u00a0description. I\u2019m confident about how much description is desirable in the fiction genres I normally work in. But I hadn\u2019t written a young adult novel before, and I hadn\u2019t written much\u00a0historical fiction.<\/p>\n

So I started reading\u00a01959<\/i>\u00a0with an eye to how much and what kind of description Davis uses in her novel. And to my surprise, her descriptive prose isn’t especially immersive in many instances:<\/p>\n

There really wasn\u2019t anyplace a boy could take a girl. There was a colored\u00a0bowling alley\u00a0in an old\u00a0Quonset hut, where boys set up the pins, and one segregated movie house. We could get take-out snacks at Shorty\u2019s little\u00a0drive-in\u00a0place, or go to somebody\u2019s house. If you were very careful about nobody seeing you, there were some places you could walk on the\u00a0beach. These things didn\u2019t matter much, since\u00a0being with a boy in a car\u00a0seemed clearly the most exciting thing you were going to do anyway. Going somewhere was\u00a0gravy. We drove around to the quiet\u00a0boulevard where the\u00a0rich folks\u00a0lived and the whole bay opened into the sky.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The description here is\u00a0specific\u00a0but almost totally without any\u00a0detail. Davis relies on the reader having experiences with bowling alleys and\u00a0drive-in restaurants to fill in those details on their own. We can easily imagine Willie and her friends getting\u00a0hot dogs\u00a0and sodas at Shorty\u2019s, but we can\u2019t really know that from the narrative. If you have been to a\u00a0beach, you can imagine secluded spots the kids could go to take a walk, but if you\u2019re a landlocked\u00a0Midwesterner\u00a0like me, that line comes off as a little less than\u00a0evocative. We don\u2019t know anything about what kind of car they\u2019re driving around in; there\u2019s no\u00a0sensory grounding about the\u00a0smell\u00a0of the\u00a0ashtray\u00a0or whether anyone put\u00a0fuzzy dice\u00a0on the rearview mirror or if there were\u00a0ketchup\u00a0stains on the upholstery or anything. We know the rich folks lived on a boulevard, but what does any of that look like?\u00a0Big white houses\u00a0with shading oaks and three-car garages? Brick\u00a0mansions with\u00a0ivy,\u00a0statuary\u00a0and fountains? The book doesn\u2019t tell us.<\/p>\n

But, as the narrator says, these things don\u2019t matter so much to the novel. The world building work in these pages is borne not by any\u00a0lush, specific detail but through\u00a0dialogue\u00a0and the\u00a0emotional details\u00a0of the narrative. It\u2019s a book about\u00a0people<\/i>, not things; snacks and cars and beaches can remain fairly\u00a0generic\u00a0background props that don\u2019t really matter compared to the relationships in the foreground.<\/p>\n

Seeing that Davis doesn\u2019t bother with describing what\u00a0record players\u00a0in 1959 actually looked like or what teens on a date might have to eat should give other writers more confidence in the levels of description they’ve chosen for their own novels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1959\u00a0is a novel by\u00a0Thulani Davis\u00a0that was published in 2001 by\u00a0Grove Press. It is a first-person\u00a0coming-of-age\u00a0narrative that chronicles a young black girl named Willie Tarrant coping […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[97,133],"class_list":["post-2190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-novels","tag-ya"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/Thulani-Davis.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qT6f-zk","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2075,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/recitatif\/","url_meta":{"origin":2190,"position":0},"title":"Recitatif","author":"Lucy A. 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It's typically used in narrative interludes during operas, for instance. \u201cRecitatif\u201d is Toni Morrison\u2019s one and only published short story; you can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "book review"","block_context":{"text":"book review","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/book-review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Toni_Morrison_2008.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":572,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/shirley-jackson\/","url_meta":{"origin":2190,"position":1},"title":"Shirley Jackson","author":"Lucy A. 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