Review: "The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter" by Kia Corthron

While I have come across a few reviews that chides Kia Corthron’s debut novel The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter as being too long, I do not feel its 789 pages hurts it in any way. I do not want to dismiss the criticism that it is too long, since it is a valid one, but books like this, which aim high and feel like little empires in the palm of your hand, make my literary heart melt. They can take a toll (as this one certainly did) but I come out the other side feeling rewarded, thankful I took such an arduous journey and feel more than a little sad that it is over with. From its rich quartet of two sets of black and white brothers and the just as rich cast of supporting characters to its challenging yet fun game of narrative hopscotch it liked to play through different sections, switching from first to third person, the perspective growing and maturing with the lives of the characters and the way it dances around the mystery at the center of the novel, a harrowing event that links all four lives through the greater half of 20^th century America and the first part of the 21^st. Of the two sets of brothers, we are introduced to the Evans first, a white family living in the rural town of Prayer Ridge, Alabama living in the shadow of the KKK and casual yet brutal racism. We get inside the head of the youngest son, Randall, a gifted adolescent who seems to be on the fast track to becoming the first person in his family to go to high school. He is the class’s valedictorian and almost won the school a debate tournament if it weren’t for his position on the ongoing war.  He acts as a sort of big brother in spirit to his actual big brother B. J. who himself is almost an adult when the story begins in 1940, but due to his deafness is treated like someone with severe mental deficiencies. He is able to teach him how to read and how to use sign language and in a real nice touch, how to use the local library. After this first section ends, we meet the Campbell’s, a black family that lives in the rather progressive and integrated small town of Humble, Maryland. The section switches perspectives between the six year old Eliot, eager and eternally enthralled by a visit from civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph who inspires him to become a civil rights attorney and the twelve year old Dwight, who’s artistically inclined yet uncomfortable in an unrecognizable world who feels more comfortable with his white male friends than his black relatives. We do not figure out the horrific encounter that scatters these four lives in places as various as New York City, San Francisco and Texas, and this gives Corthron the chance to allow subtle and sly connections to creep in that tether the four men together in strange ways (motifs like cats, cancer and miscarriages appear more than once) and  to compassionately detail the lives of these four men, each with their own terrible flaws and who come across as something more than victims and victimizers, especially the character of Randall, who fascinated me most and, in a different story would not garner as much sympathy as I think he does. This is a towering achievement of scope and empathy that adds complexity to our nation’s history and to four lives caught up in its transformative mechanisms. 

Rating: 5/5