Arlene McKanic

The love of movies links three generations of African-American women in former Essence editor Martha Southgate's latest novel, Third Girl from the Left.

The title refers to Angela, daughter of Mildred and mother of Tamara, who had a brief and somewhat shabby career as an extra in '70s blaxploitation films she always seemed to be the third girl from the left in this or that scene. Angie's love of film was first nurtured by Mildred, who as a child witnessed the murder of her own mother during the 1921 Tulsa race riots. Mildred's frequent trips to the local cinema help her escape the dullness of her middle-class life and the pressure of childhood memories. Once Angie escapes stultifying Tulsa for Hollywood, she becomes estranged from her family, who are shocked by the films she makes. Her relationship with her daughter Tamara, conceived during an affair with a fellow actor, can also be fractious. Tamara makes movies herself; she's a second camera assistant on "Law and Order" until a sense of duty and curiosity takes her to Oklahoma to record Mildred's last illness. Thus, movies for these women are a form not only of escape but empowerment and, finally, healing.

Southgate's writing is lean, matter-of-fact and brightened with tart humor, though she doesn't shy from raunchiness where it's necessary—the world through which Angie moves is a rough one. The interweaving of personal and cultural history is subtle and unexpectedly satisfying. We are taken from Mildred's lush '50s and '60s films to Angie's big scene in Coffy to Tamara and the progress that allows her to at least attend film school and be an assistant on a hit show, even though white male directors still get the plum jobs. Third Girl from the Left is a wise and compassionate book.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, dealt with the sorrow and horror of the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s. Her new novel, The Untelling, though focused on one family, tells a story no less wrung with grief.

When Ariadne Jackson was around 10 years old, her father and younger sister Genevieve were killed in a car crash that Jones describes with quiet, matter-of-fact horror. Ariadne, her mother Eloise and older sister Hermione survived, physically unscarred, but psychologically mangled. The damage sometimes manifests in roundabout ways. Eloise's quirkiness she chose her daughters' names can turn mean; she can bake BB's into cornbread, or capriciously lock her daughters out of the house. Hermione has married her father's best friend and her relations with her stepdaughter, a woman who's older than she is, are icy. Ariadne's father died when she was on the brink of puberty, and it seems that her very womanhood has been compromised. This problem has especially sad consequences for her relationship with her boyfriend Dwayne. Also, like her mother (who was holding baby Genevieve on her lap during the car accident), Ariadne carries an unwarranted but overpowering burden of guilt: she blames herself for refusing to comfort her father during his last moments of life.

Jones surrounds these unhappy women with other well-drawn characters. There's Cynthia, the homeless crack addict; Rochelle, Ariadne's roommate whom Ariadne envies for her smooth relationship with her fiancé; and Keisha, the sweet but naive pregnant teenager who attends Ariadne's literacy class. Even Ariadne's father, though only seen in glimpses, comes across as sweet, gentle and flawed. Jones' writing is graceful and lucid, and though the story ends unhappily, it doesn't end in despair. The Jacksons are strong women; they have survived, and will continue to survive. The Untelling is a poignant story about the often cruel randomness of life, and how one woman in particular copes with it.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Let those who complain that Joyce Carol Oates writes too much be silent: even her bad stuff is interesting. And her latest, The Falls, is her best novel since We Were the Mulvaneys. Like that memorable book, The Falls concerns the rise, fall(s) and reconstruction of a family in upstate New York. The Oatesian themes are all here: the terrible cost of even the smallest happiness, the degradation of being female, the deadly struggle between the powerful and the powerless.

The Falls spans from the early '50s to the late '70s, and begins with a calamity. Ariah Erskine's husband jumps from Niagara Falls only hours after their likely unconsummated wedding night at a resort hotel. Ariah seems to be another of Oates' nearly somnambulistic child-women, and we almost don't wonder why her equally neurasthenic husband tossed himself into the Falls. But during the wait for the whirlpool to disgorge his body, Ariah meets and falls in love with Dirk Burnaby, an idealistic young lawyer, and almost blossoms. They marry, have children, grow prosperous, and then, under the pressure of so much abundance, everything goes to smash. Bearing and raising children drain and coarsen Ariah, and the bewildered Dirk throws himself into one of the first Love Canal pollution lawsuits. This ruffles the feathers of some local bigwigs, and the consequences of his zeal are disastrous. Years pass before the three Burnaby children the saintly Chandler, the ironically named Royall, and the sad and vulnerable Juliet find a tentative healing.

Oates knows the Niagara Falls area down to its molecules: the way little rainbows come and go in the spray of the cataract, and the weird spell it casts to draw people to their ruin. She knows the smells, textures and habits of both wildflowers and toxic ooze from dumpsites. One could say that Niagara Falls is the book's most compelling character. Powerful, compassionate and ruefully humorous, The Falls is another example of Oates' inexhaustible brilliance.

Arlene McKanic lives in Jamaica, New York, but has never visited Niagara Falls.

Windsor Armstrong, the protagonist of Alice Randall's stellar sophomore novel Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, has a problem. Her son, star football player Pushkin X, is marrying a Russian lap dancer, and it's driving her crazy. The craziness springs from the fact that Windsor, a professor of Afro-Russian studies with a near fetish for the great poet after whom her son is named, is a control freak who regards her future daughter-in-law with a blunt racism.

The reader is initially not inclined to like Windsor very much. But Randall, the gifted author of the controversial novel The Wind Done Gone, eventually makes us care for the uptight, cerebral and self-obsessed professor. Certainly Windsor has a reason to be uptight; she was the child of a cold and narcissistic mother and a father whose love was so overwhelming that when he finally split with his wife he made Windsor feel guilty for not staying with him no matter that she was all of 10 years old and had no say in custody matters.

Windsor's tumultuous extended family is made up of folks of mixed race and mixed motives. Pushkin X is the product of a rape that occurred just before Windsor arrived at Harvard. Undaunted, she not only decided to keep the baby, but also went on to get her degree, though it meant having to leave her son behind in Detroit with a disreputable caretaker. Her gnawing guilt also colors her attitude toward Pushkin X, but Windsor's love for her son is as all-encompassing as her father's was for her. Randall infuses the book with the aching sadness of a mother who, having struggled and achieved a certain level of success, must find a way to allow her son to live his own life. In Windsor Armstrong, Randall has created an unusual, exasperating but ultimately sympathetic heroine. As Windsor says of herself, "There are stories within me and vanishings about me. Who will I show you? Who do you really need to see?" Pushkin and the Queen of Spades is a thought-provoking work from a writer with a unique view of the world.

Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, takes place in 1979, around the time of the infamous murders of African-American children in Atlanta, but this powerful new novel isn't what you might think. To her credit, Jones doesn't present us with the point of view of the murderer; the bloodiest thing that happens is a busted lip from a playground fall. Instead, ingeniously, Jones sees the events through the eyes of three schoolchildren, whose utterly ordinary lives are skewed by the fact that a shadowy killer is out there.

The children, who attend the same elementary school, are Tasha, whose parents' divorce is interrupted by the killing spree; Rodney, the class nerd whose bad relationship with his boorish father leads to tragedy; and Octavia, an intelligent child shunned for being both too poor and too black for her schoolmates. Yes, Jones does go unflinchingly into the color thing among African Americans. What's more remarkable is that she presents the voices of these children with rare precision.

In the midst of the horror, the three kids, all on the cusp of puberty, must still deal with their school's Darwinian social structure, including precarious contact with the opposite sex, adults who mean well and adults who don't and parents whose love for them is, to paraphrase Tillie Olsen, more anxious than proud. Jones grasps both the pain of having to sit by yourself in the cafeteria and the humiliation of poverty, the pleasure of a brand-new pink coat lined with bunny fur and the dismaying cliquishness of young girls. The children are so vivid and alive that one's stomach knots up with increasing apprehension from nearly the first page. "Please don't let any of these children be snatched," you pray, but, like Octavia, you find that not all prayers are answered.

The book's ending is one of the most quietly devastating this reviewer has ever read. Leaving Atlanta, which deals with the effects of serial murder, is simply brilliant a gentle and beautiful book on a horrific subject.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.