Valerie Sayers
…Rowell is as interested in depicting the unraveling culture as he is in reclaiming the history of Kennedy's assassination, but real events are crisply and memorably delivered…Rowell writes narrative with the clarity of good reporting…and if these multiple story lines don't get resolved—as with grief, there's no such thing as closure—they ultimately add up to a sweeping view of a roiling country. This is a novel with its own panoramic vision of the optimism and hope engendered by Kennedy's run for the presidency, and of the deep, confused grief unloosed by his slaying.
—The Washington Post
From the Publisher
Review by Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Widower’s Tale
Among several impressive debut novels I’ve read in recent years, David Rowell’s is a hands-down standout; in fact, it’s hard to believe this book is his first. Like Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin—equally masterful in its plotting, equally moving in its kaleidoscopic ensemble of perspectives—The Train of Small Mercies takes us to the heart of a quiet but resonant moment in American history and, through that moment, deep into the hearts of numerous characters whose ordinary lives are touched and changed by the events of a single day.
According to an author’s note at the end of the novel, Rowell was inspired by the Paul Fusco photographs collected in the book RFK Funeral Train. In 1968, Look magazine assigned Fusco to document Robert Kennedy’s funeral in Arlington Cemetery—and to ride the train carrying the senator’s body from New York’s Penn Station to Union Station in Washington, D.C. En route, Fusco shot more than a thousand photographs of the mourners along the train tracks.
Through the eyes of imagined witnesses to the passage of that train (some intent on paying homage, others there by happenstance or obligation), Rowell creates an intricately linked chain of stories—each one utterly captivating—that coalesce into a vision of America in a year of turbulent change. Yet there is nothing “studied” or stiff about Rowell’s authentic portrait of this legendary moment in our history, and his ability to give us a window on that era through a wide range of particular viewpoints is simply stunning, whether he’s writing about a black Pullman porter whose first day on the job happens to be on the funeral train, a Vietnam vet struggling to find a new normal after losing a leg, a young Irish nanny who’d been hoping to land a job with the senator’s family, or a sixth-grade boy making the best of life after his parents’ divorce. All told, Rowell holds the reader in a state of wonder and suspense through half a dozen tales that come together gorgeously as one. The Train of Small Mercies shows us how the tiniest private moments are often inextricable from the most monumental public events, how collectively they define nothing less than history itself. What a generous and versatile imagination Rowell has; I can’t wait to see what he does next.
“[Rowell] has created nothing less than a portrait of America itself.”—Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto
“A novel of transcendent literary vision.”—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
“What a tapestry, so evocative!”—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
“[A] rich and vivid novel.” —Ron Carlson, author of The Signal
AudioFile
Jeremy Davidson does some virtuoso voice work…Davidson keeps listeners interested…in this snapshot of a turbulent time in American history.”
author of Bel Canto Ann Patchett
David Rowell…has created nothing less than a portrait of America itself.”
Wells Tower
The Train of Small Mercies is a novel of transcendent literary vision, one that conveys with brilliance and compassion the unattended lives and moments that shoulder history’s freight.”
Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Strout
What a tapestry, so evocative!”
Booklist
[T]his closely observed novel...[is] an evocative debut...
Kirkus Reviews
Washington Post editor Rowell locates his journalistic first novel at the intersection between private lives and national events, in this case Robert Kennedy's death.
As the train carries Kennedy's body from New York to D.C., Rowell cuts in and out among a cross section of Americans who live along the route, or in one case are visiting the area. The weakest stories are those about the black characters: a porter assigned to the Kennedy train his first day on the job and a concierge at a quality D.C. hotel who walks the generational line between dignity and servility. Both threads strive for complexity but bear too heavy a stamp of white liberal sympathy. Similarly, the story of an Irish born young woman up for a job as the Kennedys' new nanny is a little too full of charm and blarney to feel realistic. On the other hand, fully believable is the disabled Vietnam vet being interviewed as a hero by a former high-school classmate (never a friend) for the local paper. As tensions and disappointments roil together along with miscommunications, the vet's increasing isolation from his supportive but clueless family is gut-wrenching without being sentimental. So are the ill-fated adventures of a well-meaning middle-class woman sneaking off with her little girl to see the funeral train despite her husband's rabid conservatism. Tension rises as she makes one poor choice after another until tragedy strikes, when readers are sucker-punched by her husband's surprising emotional sensitivity. A more quietly painful plotline concerns a young boy recently "kidnapped" by his divorced father. Forcibly returned to his mother, whom he also loves, the boy plays out his emotional confusion while horsing around with his friends on the train tracks. In contrast, Rowell takes a detached, minimalist approach to depict pot-smoking, angst-ridden suburbanites celebrating their new swimming pool.
The Kennedy train is a weak link here between plot segments that are stylistically disjointed and lack any deeper thematic connection.
