A Good Neighborhood

By Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martins     2020
311 pages     Literary

 Well this is an interesting conundrum. I really wanted to like A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler. I tried extremely hard to like it. Here is a synopsis of the book. In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son. Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door—an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter. Thanks to his thriving local business, Brad Whitman is something of a celebrity around town, and he's made a small fortune on his customer service and charm, while his wife, Julia, escaped her trailer park upbringing for the security of marriage and homemaking. Their new house is more than she ever imagined for herself, and who wouldn't want to live in Oak Knoll? With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over a historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

 I was so intrigued by the structure. In the book, the neighbors in that “good” neighborhood serve as a Greek chorus, and just like all neighbors in “tight knit” communities, they seem to know the details before anyone else. (Frankly, that is why I moved out of a small community.) And, I might add, as the storytellers, the neighbors are proud to know the details and to be telling the story. This is a neighborhood much like mine—middle class, established, fifty to eighty year-old homes, educated population, pretty much white. The Book Page reviewer says of the structure: “Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy ... fast-paced and thoughtful.”

Fowler excuses herself in the acknowledgement as a white woman trying to speak from the perspective of the two African American residents—mother and son. She says that she did her homework, as was recommended by author, Zadie Smith. At the same time, the characters all seem to be one-dimensional and to a certain extent to be caricatures. Particularly Brad Whitman, who bandies around his success as a businessman for all to see. He is a creepy step-father to Juniper, the teen-aged daughter of his wife, Julia. He thinks that he can have her in the same way that he can have a fancy car, a huge house, and six television sets. He appears as a character without depth, as does his wife Julia, although Julia, in the end, shows some guts and leaves the man.

Xavier, the bi-racial teenager is a striver. Yet, he can never get beyond the fact that his mother is black and his deceased father was white. And Juniper, the teenage girl in the story has to deal with her own stigma—that her parents made her take a purity oath when she was fourteen. Please!

Yeah, I didn’t like any of these characters. Didn’t like the plot. I think basically all I liked was the structure, and I kept reading because the structure fascinated me. The reviewer in the New York Times, Kiley Reid, who is the author of Such a Fun Age, helped me put into words what I was feeling. After having been burned by the negative cultural reviews of American Dirt, I perhaps was extra sensitive to the cultural inferences and assumptions in A Good Neighborhood, so I was receptive to what Reid wrote. Reid says, “’A Good Neighborhood’ is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors. . .can limit a novel’s understanding of human behavior.” Her review is quite scathing, and frankly, I had to agree with it. She also says, “But her novel breaks the promise of its premise, revealing weaknesses in both craft and conviction. In the same way that activism cannot be sold for $26, black characters cannot be bought when they lack depth and accessibility.”

Read A Good Neighborhood if you are interested in reading a book about good intentions, good development, but very poor understanding of cultural norms.