Even with a huge cast of characters, every one of them is distinct. It's fat, but not bloated, unlike some other 700 page authors I can think of (GRRM). ( )

There was an element of Papa's dictum in my reading of John Sayles' doorstop qua cinder block of a narrative, it sat gradually until suddenly I devoured its 1000 pages. My cheekiest nod to the novel is that its as if the Chums of Chance (Pynchon's creations in Against The Day) chose to chronicle American Race and Imperium. That said, Sayles never appears overwrought nor resigned to types or constructs in establishing his dramatic web.

As many may know, I once considered African-American history to be a desired career path. The plausibility of that now strikes me as either ancient or a thumbnail sketch I was considering for a screenplay. My focus and affairs drifted quite far afield and I was thus caught unawares by how the description of the purge of Wilmington affected me. Not that I find such removed or distinct from any other pogrom, far from it, but as domestic political discourse appears as of late to be saturated with racial codes, I do wonder.

a postscript would simply nudge and nod. Glancing back at the work, I sense a lingering both above and within the influences of Vidal and Vollmann. We are prodded, we remember and thus imagine. ( )

Having watched several of Sayles' films, it didn't surprise me that his leftist leanings come through in this long, much too long, novel. Taking place roughly between 1898 and 1900, it's got all the excesses of greedy imperial America on view: appalling mining conditions, war to seize territory, whites killing blacks, con men, exploitation everywhere. That's cool; there certainly was all that in those years. But Sayles' take is relentlessly pessimistic about the average man -- make that white man, because pretty much all the women and black men are decent human beings in his tale. That's not to say that the historical details are inaccurate; there he is on firm ground. But there is really no arc to this story that would make it a compelling read; instead, I found it rather static. Action proceeds in little bursts for the multiple story lines, effectively killing any sort of drama from building. No doubt we're supposed to be impressed with the parallels with America today; I don't think Sayles is capable of subtlety.

And there is a non-character named Pynchon on page 567. What is that about? ( )

If Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States were a novel, it might be the long version of Sayles's A Moment in the Sun. Not that the novel at hand is the short version. At 955 pages, A Moment in the Sun is capacious, to say the least. Set during the years that for half of my life we called The Turn of the Century (1896-1902)the novel begins with the gold rush in the Yukon & ends with the assassination of President McKinley & the U.S. takeover of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war (Manifest Destiny in action). A number of the main characters (Dr. Lunceford, his son Junior & daughter Jessie; Royal & Jubal Scott; Harry & Nils Manigault)come from Wilmington, North Carolina, where a coup d'etat in 1898 disenfranchises the majority black population of the city; some are murdered & thousands more are forced into exile. John Sayles is a gifted storyteller both as novelist & filmmaker. His characters are fully human, flawed & wonderful in equal measure. The most vile of the men here (& uncharacteristically for Sayles the filmmaker, almost all of the important characters in the novel are men)may be Nils Manigault, amoral, corrupt to the core & simply cruel. He doesn't deserve to remain standing at the end of the novel, but he does & we find it hard to hate even him unreservedly, bad actor that he is. All the characters are complex & if there is one criticism that I might have of the novel it is that there are perhaps too many of them, too many stories being told. Yes, the aim is to create a panorama & that is achieved, but the price is paid in giant steps, gaps in each story (it takes a long while to get back to someone)& the complete fall off from some more minor but equally fascinating subjects, such as the women Mei, Nilda & Miss Loretta or the Ojibwe Indian Big Ten. Sayles take on war in general here is similar to that of his movie Men With Guns. Pressured from all sides, the ordinary people are generally shit out of luck whichever side they end up on (here, that of the Spanish, the Americans or the Revolutionaries/ Filipino patriots). Issues of racism are everywhere pervasive, both at home in the U.S. & abroad in her imperial adventures. In fact, it becomes almost impossible to imagine an American society sans racism, so central to the making of this country has it been. Toward the very end of the novel, Sayles writes a scene, though rife with all the contradictions of American society, that shows a glimpse of what that non-racist world might hold. Dr. Lunceford, exiled to NYC after the Wilmington debacle & long delayed recognition of his medical license, finally is able to practice legally as a physician & move the remains of his family (his daughter Jessie & her daughter Minnie)to decent housing & out of abject poverty, is tagged on the arm by a street boy. His pal, known to us as the newsboy the Yellow Kid, is in dire straights down some insalubrious alley. Dr. Lunceford is wary but follows the boy to find the Kid in very bad shape, jaundiced & in great pain from a tumor that only surgery can remedy. The Doctor sends the boy's pal off to call the ambulance at the nearest hospital (the City being what it is, we have no assurance that that ambulance will ever arrive, or arrive on time). Meanwhile all the Doctor can do is comfort the boy, hold him in a human embrace. The boy comments (unnecessarily, I think) when he lays his hand upon the Doctor's that they are the same color, the doctor being a fair-skinned black man & the boy a yellow-brown jaundiced white boy. The Doctor in his former life (Wilmington before the coup d'etat)was African-American royalty so to speak. He lived in a white neighborhood; his son had a college education & his daughter was a piano prodigy destined for the conservatory. His family employed black servants & had a distinct sense of class. He believed in Dubois's Talented Tenth & placed his family among them. He rejected his daughter's love affair with a decent young man from the "other side of the tracks." But life has been the great leveler for Dr. Lunceford & so at the end of the novel he is in an embrace with a very sick, very declasse orphaned white newsboy while his daughter & granddaughter are greeting back home on the stoop the erstwhile rejected Royal Scott, "home" at last from his seemingly interminable engagement with the black regiment, the 25th, in Cuba, Arizona & the Philippines. ( )

I need to get a hardcover copy of this, there's no way the paperback will hold up. This book also has an excellent ancillary website with annotated pictures.

Check it: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/amomentinthesun/bonus