Late City

July 5, 2021
Pulitzer winner Butler steps away from his Christopher Marlowe Cobb series for a moving tale of love and misunderstanding. In 2016, Sam Cunningham, 115 and dying in a nursing home, is visited by God, who interviews him as if for a story (“I want you to talk to me, Samuel. About your life. On the record”). In 1917, Sam flees Louisiana and his racist abusive father to enlist in the Army. After the war, Sam lands a job as a reporter in Chicago and marries Colleen, who in 1922 delivers their only child, Ryan. Sam loves his wife and son, but is unable or unwilling to recognize their true natures, or to grasp why Colleen married him. As WWII looms, Sam tries to prepare the sensitive Ryan for battle. (“I just want you to have the best chance to fully become what you are,” he says, unaware of the irony.) Determined to make his father proud, Ryan joins the Navy in 1940, and what happens to him during the war will change everyone in the family. The God character at first seems a superfluous narrative artifice, but Butler mines the device for an elegant pair of revelations about Colleen and Ryan. Readers with the patience for an old man’s stubbornness will appreciate the redemption herein. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc.

September 1, 2021
A 115-year-old newspaperman looks back on both his life and a century of American-made toxic masculinity. Sam Cunningham, the narrator of this high-concept historical novel, is the last living World War I veteran. As the story opens, on the night of Donald Trump's election as president, he's in a retrospective, embittered mood. He recalls his childhood in Louisiana with his closed-off, racist father, his stint in the war as a crack Army sniper, and, most prominently, his career at a Chicago newspaper, rising from cub reporter to editor-in-chief. Butler, who in recent years has focused on historical thrillers, is attuned to the details of war zones and the journalism world, emphasizing how we fail to see history's cruelest men in the moment. Turning a blind eye to mobsters like Al Capone, fascists like Hitler, and demagogues like Huey Long as they emerged, Butler suggests, is an American tradition that led directly to Trump. Butler is strongest, though, when he approaches the theme from a more intimate perspective: the way Sam's father rationalized lynchings and how the hypermasculine newsroom environment distanced him from his own son. (Sam's wife, Colleen, who first took him in as a boarder after the war, is a sensible sounding board with a progressive streak.) The novel's conceit--Sam's extreme age and debates with God during his long night of the soul--fits somewhat awkwardly over the more domestic details, and Butler telegraphs plot turns that make the story feel predictable. But the novel is affecting as Sam's private reckoning with what Colleen calls his " 'be a man' crusade," recalling the better work of the late Ward Just, who wrote similar novels about fathers, sons, and (often misguided) senses of duty. Sage historical fiction that gets into the emotional grit behind major news events.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2021
Sam Cunningham, at age 115 "the last living veteran of World War I," watches the 2016 presidential election in disbelief. Suddenly death seems near, then God appears in Sam's Chicago nursing home and asks him to talk about his life: "I want you to live your stories just as they felt in their own moment." As a quintessential old-school newspaperman, Sam is a seasoned storyteller, but his past takes on new configurations and added dimensions as he revisits his small-town Louisiana boyhood as the only child of an abusive father, service in France as an army sniper, arrival in Chicago, lifesaving love for a war widow of deep perception and strength, and rise through the ranks as a devoted newsman. With headlines pegging the defining events of the times running parallel to Sam's evolving insights, Butler celebrates the golden era of newspapers ("late city" is a paper's ""last-hour"" edition) and tracks matters of race, masculinity, war, and sexuality. Sam's most profound reckoning is with his inability to be close to his son. With two dozen remarkably imaginative and empathic fiction titles to his credit, Butler brings preternatural attunement to the spiraling of the mind and ardently honed artistry to this exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait of a man reflecting on more than a century's worth of horror and wonder.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.