The Gettin Place

by Susan Straight

Overview

Susan Straight's most powerful novel yet is framed by two race riots: the little known Tulsa riots of the 1920s, in which white Tulsa burned down the town's black enclave; and the notorious L. A. riots of the 1990s.

Straight's brilliant story of the effects of violence in America on three generations of a family is told through the lives of the Thompsons, a large clan who live in Treetown, above downtown Rio Seco, California, and operate a car towing and repair business. Patriarch Hosea is a proud man, and a hardened one, whose father was killed in the violence that erupted in Tulsa many years earlier. All Hosea's memories come flooding black with ferocious force when the bodies of two white women are found engulfed in flames in an abandoned car on his property. These are the first signs that someone wants Hosea off his land; it is up to his son Marcus, the only one of the six children of Hosea and his half-Mexican wife who can negotiate with the white world, to help the family hold on to their home and their livelihood.

But it is only when Marcus' nephew Motrice-a young man infatuated with guns and the power that they bring- comes back to Rio Seco from gang-ridden Los Angeles that the real secrets of the bodies found on Thompson land are revealed, as Rio Seco erupts in the same wave of trashing and looting that has engulfed the nearby metropolis.

The Gettin Place is a powerful portrait of a family struggling to defend its turf in a changing world, to hold on to the gettin place, the source from which they derive the tools for survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385486590
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/28/1997
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	275,004
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Susan Straight is the author of six novels, including A Million Nightingales and the National Book Award finalist Highwire Moon. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Her short stories have won an Edgar Award and an O. Henry Award. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Editorial Reviews

Straight's third novel is a continuation of her impassioned chronicling of the tough, embattled, hardscrabble life faced by many black Americans. As with Darker than a Thousand Midnights and I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, the principal setting is Rio Seco, a fictional California city outside of L.A. The "gettin place" of the title is a parcel of land along an old canal where the extended Thompson clan has its adobe homes and the family businesses-a garage and towing yard, a rib joint and a small olive orchard. When the bodies of two white women are found burned in a dilapidated car in the lot, and when the body of a man dressed in drag is discovered nearby, the Thompsons become the focus of law enforcement attentions while the video of the Rodney King beating plays incessantly on TV. Marcus Thompson, the youngest of eight boys of Hosea and Alma Thompson, has apparently escaped the clutches of Rio Seco life: he teaches history, works out in a fitness club, prefers sushi to chitlins and counts many "sherberts" (white yuppies) among his friends. But Marcus is drawn by his family loyalties into an armed defense against the powers that be-not only cops but also politicians and land developers. As usual, Straight paints a remarkably detailed picture of the moral, economic and historical web in which black families can be caught, and the way in which fear and honor contend in men's souls. Although The Gettin Place does suffer from a surplus of characters and plot twists as Straight attempts to reveal a land-grab conspiracy, her imagined Rio Seco is surely among the richest soils worked by an American novelist today. Author tour. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Straight's third novel set in fictional Rio Seco, California (following I Been to Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, LJ 4/15/94, and Blacker Than a Thousand Nights, Hyperion, 1994), five generations of one family respond to several months of violence and unrelenting tension. In a disorienting, mesmerizing opening sequence, two white women are murdered on the hardscrabble but fertile property of Hosea Thompson. A transvestite stranger, an unknown black man, a teenager, a brother, and an affluent villain are murdered in turn, while Marcus, Hosea's youngest and most citified son, struggles to solve the mysteries, protect his family, and comprehend senselessness. His brother Finis, brain-damaged and only willing to speak in song lyrics, disappears; his troubled sister Sofelia reappears from silent years in L.A. with her already-embittered son, Mortrice. Against the backdrop of the underacknowledged race riots of 1920s Tulsa and the contrastingly media-saturated 1992 L.A. riots, Straight realizes the chillingly natural, almost blithe cynicism and violence of teenagers, the profound weight of hard history on the old, and the bewilderment of those in-between. A lyrical and unflinching stunner; highly recommended.-Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio

Library Journal

An ambitious and engrossing portrayal of a black family under siege in white America, by the accomplished young author of the short-story sequence Aquaboogie (1990) and the novel I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots (1992).

The story is set, as are Straight's earlier books, in a racially divided California city: This time, it's (fictional) Rio Seco, where hardworking Hosea Thompson's relative security (he owns an auto salvage and repair business) is threatened when a burning car with two dead white women in it is found on his property and Hosea, protesting police accusations, is shot and wounded, then jailed. The story branches out quickly, and in several fruitful directions. Straight explores the reactions of Hosea's aggrieved and mystified family; his memories of the (historical) race riots of some 60 years earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when his family was terrorized and his father killed; the enlistment of his youngest son Marcus (a high-school history teacher, whom his rough-edged older siblings nickname "Sissyfly") to help prove Hosea's innocence; and Marcus's own complicated memories of growing up knowing he wanted a different life, struggling to keep his distance from his family without succumbing to condescension. Straight stumbles only when detailing Marcus's attempts to jog his sullen students' consciences during Black History month; here, and only here, the novel briefly shrinks to the dimensions of a sociology lesson. Otherwise, its power to involve us in the lives of a sprawling clan whose members are all vividly differentiated remains undiminished over more than 400 pages. Nor should it be forgotten that Straight has contrived a fascinating mystery, whose credible and satisfying solution contains a stunning climactic irony.

Both dramatic and melodramatic in the best possible senses: another impassioned and powerful performance by one of the best writers to have emerged in this decade.

Kirkus Reviews