Review: "Visible Empire" by Hannah Pittard

Visible Empire, Hannah Pittard’s fourth novel is at the very least different than her other three, of which none is very much like its predecessor. Her debut, The Fates Will Find their Way recalls Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicides in a less self-conscious fashion, Reunion, her second novel is a searing look at the long held secrets between an extended family that burst forth over a weekend in Atlanta and Listen to Me, her third is a claustrophobic yet clunky look at paranoia and reserved aggression. Her fourth novel is her first attempt at a period piece and while it is hindered by its jumbled vague narrative push and being a little too long at 270 pages, it shows that Pittard possesses a great range as a writer who inhabits her characters fully and surrounds them with rich set pieces that form a cohesive whole. The book takes place in Atlanta in 1962 after the crash of Flight 007 from France kills a majority of the cities’ upper crust and damages the morale of an already fraught region of America. The book divides its time between three narrative strands. We are first introduced to Robert, a newspaper editor who mistress Rita died in the crash and instead of letting the secret die with her, he tells his pregnant wife and then runs away. Then there is Piedmont Dobbs, a young black man who was passed over when his school was selecting black students for integration who finds himself at a crossroads between his race and his desires, which puts him in the path of Robert. And in a seemingly unrelated thread there is Anastasia, a young woman who lied about being a child of one of the crash’s victims and finds comfort in the boudoir of Genie, a damaged Atlanta socialite. On their own, the stories work really well, with Robert and Piedmont’s nocturnal odyssey with P. T. Coleman, another privileged member of Atlanta’s high society, being quite funny and Anastasia and Genie’s courtship recalling Fassbinder’s Petra Von Kant in it’s focus on paintings, but together it gets messy and they come together sloppily, barely held together by dialogue only sections featuring the mayor and his wife which could have been cut out. Still, this is smart, well-researched novel from a writer I’ve come to appreciate and always be entertained by. 

Rating: 4/5