Book Review: The Gettin Place

A Fair Trade Book



Title: The Gettin Place

Author: Susan Straight

Author's web site: www.susanstraight.com

Date: 1996

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: 0-7868-6086-3

Length: 488 pages

Quote: “The wafting smell must have been the dream again, the dream of Tulsa burning, the same ashen days he’d been seeing in his sleep for...Seventy years.”

Hosea Thompson survived race riots as a boy in Tulsa. As the riots in Los Angeles start waves of violence through the small towns nearby, he’s not always sure whether he's seeing current reality or post-traumatic-stress flashbacks. He and his wife have bought a small farm in southern California, kept it going, and brought up children and grandchildren. Some of those descendants will die in the course of this novel; some are already dead, and one who’s been missing will come home. Only together will the three generations of Thompsons solve the murder mystery. (The Gettin Place is a novel, but at the center of its plot is a murder mystery.)

The Gettin Place received good reviews. Washington Post’s David Nicholson called it “a triumph,” reading it as “a portrait of a young [B]lack man trying to find his way...with...acceptance of responsibility.” That would presumably be Hosea Thompson’s son Marcus, although he’s not all that young. Marcus’s nephew and student, Mortrice, is also trying to find his way; just because he's a teenager he helps the adults solve the mystery, but his story is hardly triumphant. The story begins and ends with Hosea, but if readers prefer to identify with Marcus and read it as his story, they can. They might even identify with one or more of the women in the family: the Thompson women are as stalwart as their men. The drug culture has reached the Thompsons, leaving one man and one woman with drastic brain damage, but even they are memorable survivors.

One of them has survived a real horror story, which Straight mercifully keeps offstage. The part of the story we read is more than enough. The Ariel Castro news report shows that, yes, hatecrimes against women still occur at this magnitude.

Some of this web site’s readers may like The Gettin Place because the notion of “eminent domain” comes into it, and although Straight wasn't able to give that plot element a really satisfactory ending, at  least she shows us a greedhead land-grabber getting what all greedhead land-grabbers deserve.

Some local readers might ask whether this novel about southern California was a nostalgia trip for me. It wasn’t. I have no sense of nostalgia about any part of California, and don’t remember the southern part well enough to say how well Straight brings that landscape to life—although she certainly brings a landscape to life, and convinces me that she’s writing about a place where she’s actually lived and known people. The story, however, strikes lots of ideological resonances with me. Strong women seek freedom from oppression beside, and together with, their men. One of those men even overtly separates himself from “landless boys” who’ve failed to learn responsibility. Land should be passed down through a family, not bought up and “redeveloped” by greedheads. Natural beauty and honest work do more than psychology or psychiatry to help people with traumatic stress. Teenagers who reject family ties in favor of “peer-group relationships" get stabbed in the back—in Mortrice’s case, literally shot in the back (he survives, that time).

This is an “adult,” in the sense of “adolescent-mentality-bait,” or R-rated, novel with lots of violence, digusting language, at least three offstage rapes, and an onstage relationship that includes premarital sexual intercourse. Gritty contemporary reality, here. We’re not told whether the Thompsons consider themselves christian but there’s little evidence of specifically religious influence on their lives. nevertheless, the healthier Thompsons do take a good solid stand for traditional values, including sobriety—and loyalty to the family members who fail to uphold those values. If you like either Ishmael Reed or Alice Walker, you’ll consider The Gettin Place a feel-good book.

Still undecided? Check out her web site, and consider buying her new books as new books, by all means. This web site's Fair Trade Books program promotes older books and sends 10% of their price to the writers or their favorite charities, as a gesture of encouragement...but buying writers' new books is even more encouraging. Anyway, The Gettin Place is A Fair Trade Book: when you send $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, via U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or via Paypal to the address you get from Salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom the screen (whew!), we send $1 to Straight or the charity of her choice. One more book of similar size will fit into the $5 package; if it's Been in Sorrow's  Kitchen we'll send $2 to Straight or her charity.