Night Talk: A Novel

by Elizabeth Cox

Overview

"Cox puts a human face on the struggle for equality in this thoughtful, well-written exploration of race relations in the South."-The Raleigh News & Observer

At night, under the same roof, under the same moon, nothing divides the girls, Evie and Janey Louise. Talking in their beds, they discuss their strong mothers and their absent fathers, and they wonder about the paths their lives will take. Yet during the day, Evie is blind to their differences-that she is white and her best friend is black.

In Night Talk, Elizabeth Cox tells a moving story about two girls who, though they grew up in the same house, reflect the alternate realities of white and black society. They are influenced by both the massive social changes sweeping the country during the Civil Rights years, and by our extraordinary human capacities for fear and hate and love. But in the end, it is the world they share under cover of darkness, through their candid nighttime conversations, that proves to be the strongest force of all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555971403
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/29/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Cox is the author of four novels: Night Talk, Familiar Ground, The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, and The Slow Moon; a collection of stories, Bargains in the Real World; and a collection of poetry, I Have Told You and Told You. She has received the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction for her body of work and is a member of Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Editorial Reviews

At its core, [Night Talk] is a novel about the insidious nature of the great American dilemma. . . . Cox is a graceful writer who confronts a difficult issue, and handles it with pathos and recognition.” —The Boston Globe

“Elizabeth Cox never writers of a character whom she cannot literally inhabit. That beautiful property of her mind is visible in Night Talk.” —Reynolds Price

“In Night Talk, Elizabeth Cox's wise and touching novel, we are pulled in to the darkest fears and secrets and truths of the lives of two young women—one black and one white—their feelings and lust for life identical, their experiences of the world dramatically different. It is these differences that Elizabeth Cox illuminates so beautifully, etching that fine line between night and day, hope and despair. Ultimately Night Talk is a novel about love in all shapes and shades and forms.” —Jill McCorkle

From the Publisher

The history of racial conflict during the 1950s is reenacted on a personal scale by two adolescent girls in this sincere but sometimes unconvincing reminder of turbulent times. In 1949, white research biologist August Bell leaves his family in Mercy, Ga., ostensibly to pursue his research on the Sea of Cortez. Volusia Davis, a black domestic, moves into the house with Bell's wife, Agnes, and children, accompanied by her daughter, Janey Louise. The friendship between Janey Louise and Agnes's daughter, Evie, is the focus of the story. Between the young girls' "night talks" in their shared bedroom and Evie's letters to August, the civil rights drama of the ensuing decade unfolds: Janey Louise's brother returns from Korea a militant; Janey Louise desegregates the high school and is raped by a white man. As adults, Evie and Janey Louise reunite for Volusia's funeral and struggle to overcome the ugliness of their mutual past. Despite a jarring murder late in the book (and an occasional disregard for the actual obstacles that kept middle-class black and white girls from forming close friendships under Jim Crow), Cox (The Ragged Way People Fall in Love) uses gracefully simple, affecting prose in a bittersweet portrayal of a tumultuous era. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

YAThe day Evie's father leaves home, Volusia, their maid, and Janey Louise, her daughter, move into the house. At first, both sleep in the room off the kitchen, but after a while Janey Louise moves into Evie's bedroom, and the night talk begins. In a small Georgia town in 1949, white and colored do not share a room, much less their secrets. But over the years, Volusia and Agnes, Evie's mother, become friends and business partners and Evie and Janey Louise share their feelings about boys, their worries about school, and their thoughts about their families. Evie's parents eventually divorce, and her younger brother struggles with polio. At first, the girls go to different schools, but Janey Louise and another student begin the 1956 school year by integrating the high school, accompanied by the press and the National Guard. Violent reprisals result, and the bond between the two girls is strained as their own fears and prejudices surface. The story of this enduring friendship spans a period of 40 years, and is told with humor, understanding, and compassion. YAs will be caught up in this tale of two young women struggling against the reality of black and white society in the civil rights era. Its lessons about love, friendship, and the cost of being different are unforgettable.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

School Library Journal

Friendship across the great racial divide of the South is sensitively addressed in a novel that tries too hard to make a moving tale profound.

Cox (Familiar Ground, 1984, etc.) here uses an awkward formula—letters to a father written in childhood mixed with alternating segments on the past and the immediate present—to tell the story of white Evie Bell and black Janey. The writing tends toward the awkward as well ("I missed his brows that could bring a soft rain") as Cox strains for meaning and effect. It all begins with the funeral in Mercy, Georgia, of Volusia, Janey's mother, who for 12 years had been not only Evie's mother's housekeeper but best friend. When August, Evie's biologist father, left for good, Volusia and Janey moved in and shared the family house. Janey was also soon sharing Evie's room—though no one in the town was supposed to know: It was the '50s, and while the struggle for civil rights was becoming more evident, the South was still rigidly segregated. At night, after the lights were out, the two girls loved to talk, and each day after school they played together. But as Evie, now a teacher in Texas, visits her mother and Volusia's grieving second husband, she recalls—seeing Janey again—how difficult it was to keep up that close rapport as the outside world intervened. When Janey was 16, her brother Albert, a decorated Korean War hero, was badly beaten for his civil rights activities, and Janey was raped—events that served to strain the girls' friendship badly. Now, the murder of a white man on the eve of Volusia's funeral, a murder that Janey is accused of before being exonerated, reveals hidden secrets and renews the old, essential ties.

An affecting celebration of the resilience of friendship, but undercut by its stock characters, who, despite nods to Faulkner and other southern greats, remain flat and unsurprising.

Kirkus Reviews