The Vain Conversation: A Novel

by Anthony Grooms, Clarence Major (Foreword by), T. Geronimo Johnson (Afterword)

Overview

“A real-life racially motivated mass killing from 1946 is boldly and deeply reimagined [in this] incisive, gripping and empathetic novel” (Kirkus, starred review).

Inspired by true events, The Vain Conversation reflects on the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Georgia from the perspectives of three characters—Bertrand Johnson, one of the victims; Noland Jacks, a presumed perpetrator; and Lonnie Henson, a witness to the murders as a ten-year-old boy. Lonnie’s inexplicable feelings of culpability drive him in a search for meaning that takes him around the world, and ultimately back to Georgia, where he must confront both Jacks and his own demons.

In this stirring and incisive narrative, Anthony Grooms seeks to advance the national dialogue on race relations. With complexity, satire, and surprising moments of levity, he explores what it means to redeem and be redeemed. Deeply probing the issues of American race violence, The Vain Conversation also speaks to the broader issues of oppression and violence everywhere.

Foreword by poet, painter, and novelist Clarence Major.

Afterward by bestselling author T. Geronimo Johnson.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611178838
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/12/2021
Series:	Story River Books
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	800 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anthony Grooms is the author of Bombingham: A Novel and Trouble No More: Stories, both winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he has taught writing and American literature at universities in Ghana and Sweden and, since 1994, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

What People are Saying About This

Gray Stewart

Anthony Grooms is a master storyteller, hands down. Here he confronts the Jim Crow lynching—the most brutal of subjects in American literature, one that is all too-frequently abstracted and stereotyped. With expert prose and emotional complexity he looks through the eyes of witness, victim, and member of the mob to explore themes of redemption, salvation, and universal love. Considering headlines these days, The Vain Conversation is not just timely, it's important.

Edward P. Jones

Grooms has always had a precise and sure and precious way with words, and he does not disappoint those who have come to love his work, his way of seeing and hearing the world. We ask many things of the writers we have taken to our hearts—honesty, sincerity, sensitivity, old verities to borrow Faulkner's phrase. I suspect that those are things Grooms did not have to learn because they were already in his blood before he wrote his first words.

Ravi Howard

The Vain Conversation chronicles the shared places of the American South, where the beauty of the landscape can often mask the entanglements of an unresolved past. With historical sharpness and striking prose, Anthony Grooms again introduces us to characters who navigate the questions and dangers on the road toward progress. The vividly conjured memories turn histories into ghosts. They beckon as well as warn in this exquisitely textured novel.

Ron Rash

The Vain Conversation vividly evokes the horrors of American racism, but Anthony Grooms never denies the humanity of his characters, whether black or white, young or old. His novel achieves what only the best literature can give us: it refuses too-easy consolations or too-easy condemnations. When we finish the last page, the book is not finished with us. It will haunt us.

Editorial Reviews

In a preview of the book, New York Times best-selling author Ron Rash noted, The Vain Conversation vividly evokes the horrors of American racism, but [Anthony Grooms] never denies the humanity of his characters, whether black or white, young or old.

Kennesaw State University News

With complexity, satire, and sometimes levity, he [Grooms] explores what it means to redeem, as well as to be redeemed, on the issues of America's race violence and speaks to the broader issues of oppression and violence everywhere.

Midwest Book Review

"In a preview of the book, New York Times best-selling author Ron Rash noted, 'The Vain Conversation' vividly evokes the horrors of American racism, but [Anthony Grooms] never denies the humanity of his characters, whether black or white, young or old."--Kennesaw State University News


"That Grooms' incisive, gripping, and empathetic novel dares to probe beneath the humiliations, customs, and fears that sustain injustice implies that our seemingly eternal conversation on race, to which the title refers, may not be as vain as it often seems."--Kirkus Reviews [starred review]


"With complexity, satire, and sometimes levity, he [Grooms] explores what it means to redeem, as well as to be redeemed, on the issues of America's race violence and speaks to the broader issues of oppression and violence everywhere."--Midwest Book Review


"Grooms has always had a precise and sure and precious way with words, and he does not disappoint those who have come to love his work, his way of seeing and hearing the world. We ask many things of the writers we have taken to our hearts--honesty, sincerity, sensitivity, "old verities" to borrow Faulkner's phrase. I suspect that those are things Grooms did not have to learn because they were already in his blood before he wrote his first words."--Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World


"The Vain Conversation vividly evokes the horrors of American racism, but Anthony Grooms never denies the humanity of his characters, whether black or white, young or old. His novel achieves what only the best literature can give us: it refuses too-easy consolations or too-easy condemnations. When we finish the last page, the book is not finished with us. It will haunt us."--Ron Rash, author of Serena


"Anthony Grooms is a master storyteller, hands down. Here he confronts the Jim Crow lynching--the most brutal of subjects in American literature and one all too-frequently abstracted and stereotyped. With expert prose and emotional complexity he looks through the eyes of witness, victim, and member of the mob to explore themes of redemption, salvation, and universal love. Considering headlines these days, The Vain Conversation is not just timely, it's important."--Gray Stewart, author of Haylow


"The Vain Conversation chronicles the shared places of the American South, where the beauty of the landscape can often mask the entanglements of an unresolved past. With historical sharpness and striking prose, Anthony Grooms again introduces us to characters who navigate the questions and dangers on the road toward progress. The vividly conjured memories turn histories into ghosts. They beckon as well as warn in this exquisitely textured novel."--Ravi Howard, author of Like Trees Walking

From the Publisher

★ 2018-01-23
A real-life racially motivated mass killing from 1946 is boldly and deeply reimagined—as are its long-term reverberations.It is the summer of 1946, and 10-year-old Lonnie Henson, a young white boy living in the rural outskirts of Bethany, Georgia, is picking blackberries toward twilight when he stumbles upon a horrific sight: a crowd of white men and women, some of whom he recognizes, gathered together to shoot and bludgeon two African-American couples to death; one of the dead he recognizes as Bertrand Johnson, a family friend who'd found communion with Lonnie's late father, an ex-GI traumatized by what he'd witnessed during World War II. From that jolting opening, Grooms (Trouble No More, 1996, etc.) gradually weaves his narrative back and forth to the days, months, and years preceding and following the murders, which are drawn from a real-life lynching of two couples that same year in the same region. (No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.) With dexterity and compassion, Grooms takes the full measure of his characters, white and black, including Lonnie's parents and great aunt Grace; Bertrand's outspoken wife, Luellen, and stoic mother, Milledge; Maribelle Crookshank, owner of the local diner and town gossip; Vernon Venable, the wealthy white businessman who sets the ugly events in motion by attacking the wife of Jimmy Lee, one of the four victims; and Venable's friend Noland Jacks, who is one of those Lonnie remembers most in the lynch mob even after he's grown up and left to join the Navy, forever agonized and conscience-stricken by what he's seen. Grooms' novel presents racism as a self-perpetuating monster piling large and small atrocities atop one another. No one is immune from those atrocities or their consequences, the book strongly asserts—though it also implies that redemption, at whatever cost, may be accessible to those who, like Lonnie, feel deeply enough to escape their grim legacy.That Grooms' incisive, gripping, and empathetic novel dares to probe beneath the humiliations, customs, and fears that sustain injustice implies that our seemingly eternal conversation on race, to which the title refers, may not be as vain as it often seems.

Kirkus Reviews