A Good Neighborhood

 

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

Fiction

2020 St. Martin's Press

Finished on August 4, 2020

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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 an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

Told from multiple points of view, A Good Neighborhood asks big questions about life in America today―What does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don't see eye to eye?―as it explores the effects of class, race, and heartrending star-crossed love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.

I haven't read Fowler's previous novels (A Well-Behaved Woman and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald), but the premise of A Good Neighborhood appealed to me and I was pleased to win an ARC from the publisher earlier this year. I was quickly pulled into the narrative and enjoyed the thought-provoking story, although I didn't care for the first person plural POV, which felt gimmicky and kept me from caring about most of the characters. 

Before we depict the first encounter between our story's other central players, we need to show the wider setting in which this slow tragedy unfolded. As our resident English professor would remind us, place, especially in stories of the South, is as much a character as any human, and inseparable from--in this case even necessary to--the plot.

There is quite a bit of foreshadowing, which helped move this Greek-like tragedy along, but there were no surprises and it was all fairly predictable. My initial reaction after the intense finale, was to give the book a high rating, but after thinking about the plot and character development, I've dropped it down to an average rating. Nonetheless, this is a timely book, touching on the injustices of race and class, and would make a good selection for a book club discussion, especially if combined with Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy.