The Night Bird Cantata

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical, masterful, devastating.
Review: "It was the summer of my mother's second husband. It was the summer of full moons, night birds and paralyzed daylight; I discovered absence and the magic of pain, gifts that only the unloved can unwrap and save as something precious."

This short, opening paragraph will tell you whether you want to read this book or not. It told me I **had** to read it, and I plunged into one of the most accomplished, vividly realized, and devastating novels I've ever read.

Narrated by an adult L. P., the novel recounts one sweltering childhood summer in Phoenix, Arizona, when the two narcissitic women who rule his life - his neurotic, dependent, barely functional mother and his cruel, ice-hearted grandmother ("a tarantula in mink") - leave L. P. in the care of Betty, their black housekeeper, while they each pursue their own agendas. As an effeminate white boy in Betty's black world, L. P. experiences - for the first time - a responsible adult's love, a love as devoid of sentimentality as it is of hypocrisy. He is also introduced, briefly, to a world of sexuality that he cannot yet comprehend or enter into. But he is old enough to come to understand that his "difference" separates him, forever, from so-called "normal" people. In the last two, heartbreaking chapters, L. P. returns to his mother and grandmother, and comes face to face with the finality of their emotional abandonment. Yet, in a suspenseful denouement, he is able to assess the damage and carry on.

This novel is set in Phoenix. But with its strong women, marginalized sexuality, overlapping but separate worlds of black and white, and sweltering heat, the novel is Southern Gothic in tone. The writing is lyrical, poetic, and occasionally over-rich and strained but not often. The adult L. P. describes his own childhood world with dead-center precision, as he experienced it, with the unflinching clarity achieved after long reflection, and without a trace of self-pity.

Rawley's death in 1998 was a tragedy, first and deepest for his friends and loved ones, but also for those of us who love to read.

Rating:
Summary: An Impressive First Novel
Review: From the opening paragraph (above) of The Night Bird Cantata (1998) by Donald Rawley, readers will know they have entered a magical world of wonderful writing. Filled with metaphor and simile, The Night Bird Cantata is the fictional memoir of the summer in 1968 that L.P. (short for Lindsay Paul) spends with his grandmother's black maid in Phoenix. Separated from his mother who has had the "scent of a man drifting through" her "hair for almost six months," and who has married "a timid Irishman" named Bob Rafferty, L.P. finds himself shipped off to "the wrong side of the tracks" in a segregated city where "colored people lived south of the Gila River, a dry, shabby canal, only good for floods." At the age of ten, L.P. spends "three months of days whose clarity is both perverse and frightening, held without photographs or postcards or any other telling semblance to prove I existed, there, in Phoenix in 1968, and that I survived." Kept away from his real dad because "he isn't a nice man. he's a liar and he hits people," L.P.'s mother has remarried because L.P. isn't "masculine enough." "Besides," his mother adds, "I'm pretty sure I love him." L.P. stays with his grandmother's maid, Betty, who once cared for Errol Flynn's son and "played in a band in the late thirties" and is still known to raise her voice in song in church-- if she is sober enough while his mother is on her honeymoon. L.P.'s summer is filled with new discoveries. L.P. gets to be a kid, climb trees, dive into catfish holes dreaming "it was an ocean. Chinese junks were drifting by. There were steamships in the distance. I knew somehow that this canal led west to the ocean. That if I had to, I could swim until I reached the Pacific." L.P. goes to church with Betty and Frank, her husband, realizing he is "the only white boy there. And I liked it. It made me special." Summer is also for going bowling with Betty, her friends, and two boys that L.P. befriends, Samuel and Grover. It is also a summer in which L.P. goes without hearing from his mother for a month. "Sometimes I cried, but by July I began not to care. A clarity had enveloped my legs and arms. My heart followed." It is also during the summer of 1968 that L.P. learns about death and grieving.

Running throughout The Night Bird Cantata are two major focuses. One has to do with L.P.'s effeminate nature and the gender confusion which plagues him. In fact, throughout the book he suffers the taunts of his peers for his mannerisms and looks and he wishes that he was a girl, fantasizing about growing up and becoming a beautiful woman like his idol, Sophia Loren. Another theme that runs throughout the book is the fact that L.P. believes he is unloved. Unfortunately, this proves to be true. With the exception of Betty, adults have tolerated L.P. at best, if they haven't openly rejected him. The Night Bird Cantata is such a beautifully written, lyrical novel that readers will be shocked when these two on-going focuses of the novel run up against stark realism. L.P.'s near sexual encounter with a fifteen year old boy -- an incident which L.P. declares is life altering for him-- will startle and stun readers. But as surprising and explicit as that scene is, it cannot compare to the painfully horrid tirade of hate and revulsion that L.P. overhears spilling from his own mother's mouth about him to his grandmother. It is a scene of horror that no child should ever be exposed to and readers will not help but be moved.

It is clear that at the end of The Night Bird Cantata, that L.P., like the night bird of the book's title, has fallen from the nest and that the night is filled with silence. Readers are left with the hope that this ten year old boy who, throughout the novel has been given keen powers of perception well beyond his years, will fashion for himself a life worth living that is filled with strength and love-- two qualities his childhood certainly are without. Then the singing will be able to start up again. The Night Bird Cantata is an impressive first novel. Readers of this little work filled with so much beauty, truth, tragedy, and spirit are bound to find themselves looking forward to future work from Donald Rawley.

Rating:
Summary: Too much "prose", not enough story
Review: I generally love "coming of age" stories. The problem with this one is I had a hard time trying to find the story through all the contrived language that I assume the author intended to be deep and full of profound insight. Toward the end of the book, the story's young protagonist proclaims: "I tried to sound mysterious."

Too bad the author did, too.

Rating:
Summary: the sadness of unexplored potential
Review: Three years ago (1997), in Edinburgh, I read a review -in a UK national newspaper - of Donald Rawley's "SLOW DANCE ON THE FAULT LINE", a book of short stories published in Britain but inexplicably delayed for a couple of years in the US. The review was so enthusiastic I bought "SLOW DANCE", sight unseen, and read it in grateful gulps. Despite some odd little carelessnesses of syntax, the mood and flavor of the stories enthralled me (living as I do in LA, the setting of Rawley's meditations). I'm sad to report that the eagerly-awaited novel "NIGHT BIRD CANTATA", is a big disappointment after the heady excitement of the short stories. The novel wasn't really Rawley's ideal format - he was/is too galvanized, too involved in the precisions of the moment, to sustain a long narrative. Experience hits him in explosive chunks, and his strength is in the art of immediacy. I actually feel a little embarassed at the memory of insisting that a toal stranger should buy and read "CANTATA", when the hapless guy, browsing at my local bookstore, asked if I could recommend anything - I was so enthralled by "SLOW DANCE" I was certain the novel would be as good - I hadn't read it at the time I recommended it - there's a lesson to be learned there .... what is saddest about reading Rawley lies in the awareness that he is no longer physically with us. God rest him, and may he be secure in the knowledge that in "SLOW DANCE ON THE FAULT LINE", at least, he created a work of art that will survive the years and that continues to ripple in ever-widening circles in the consciousness of its happy readers. May he not be one whose name is writ in water.

Rating:
Summary: the sadness of unexplored potential
Review: Three years ago (1997), in Edinburgh, I read a review -in a UK national newspaper - of Donald Rawley's "SLOW DANCE ON THE FAULT LINE", a book of short stories published in Britain but inexplicably delayed for a couple of years in the US. The review was so enthusiastic I bought "SLOW DANCE", sight unseen, and read it in grateful gulps. Despite some odd little carelessnesses of syntax, the mood and flavor of the stories enthralled me (living as I do in LA, the setting of Rawley's meditations). I'm sad to report that the eagerly-awaited novel "NIGHT BIRD CANTATA", is a big disappointment after the heady excitement of the short stories. The novel wasn't really Rawley's ideal format - he was/is too galvanized, too involved in the precisions of the moment, to sustain a long narrative. Experience hits him in explosive chunks, and his strength is in the art of immediacy. I actually feel a little embarassed at the memory of insisting that a toal stranger should buy and read "CANTATA", when the hapless guy, browsing at my local bookstore, asked if I could recommend anything - I was so enthralled by "SLOW DANCE" I was certain the novel would be as good - I hadn't read it at the time I recommended it - there's a lesson to be learned there .... what is saddest about reading Rawley lies in the awareness that he is no longer physically with us. God rest him, and may he be secure in the knowledge that in "SLOW DANCE ON THE FAULT LINE", at least, he created a work of art that will survive the years and that continues to ripple in ever-widening circles in the consciousness of its happy readers. May he not be one whose name is writ in water.