It is election night in Houston, Texas, in 1996, and the residents of black neighbourhood Pleasantville are watching the numbers come in, “on the verge... of realising the dream of their lifetime, the ripe fruit of decades of labour and struggle”. Because Axel Hathorne, former chief of police and one of their own, has taken a step closer to becoming the city’s first black mayor next month.
Alicia Nowell has been campaigning, and is waiting for a bus to take her home, when she notices the sound of an engine idling down the deserted, dark street. “She couldn’t tell the make or model of the vehicle, but it was the height and width of a van, or a truck of some sort. Run. Just run. It was a whisper inside her own skull, her mother’s voice actually, calling her home.”
Attica Locke first introduced readers to lawyer and former black power activist Jay Porter in her impressive debut, Black Water Rising. Shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2010, it saw Jay dragged into a murder investigation and powerful corporations’ dirty dealings.
In Locke’s dazzlingly good third novel, Pleasantville, Jay is older, sadder, lacking in energy – his wife, Bernie, died a year ago, he’s a single parent to a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old, and he’s planning to retire once he gets the money out of one final class action suit. “A trial he can’t do”, though. “He just doesn’t have it in him any more.”
Alicia’s disappearance, however, sparks an interest – Jay doesn’t understand why the police aren’t linking it to the recent disappearances of two other girls, whose bodies were found exactly six days after they went missing. When Neal Hathorne, nephew of political candidate Axel and grandson of Pleasantville’s unofficial “mayor” Sam Hathorne, is accused of her murder, Jay reluctantly finds himself representing him, and trying to unpick just how much involvement Sandy Wolcott, the current district attorney of Harris County and the white woman who is running against Axel, has in the accusation.
Locke is juggling a lot in Pleasantville – a dirty election, a girl’s disappearance, the mysterious harassment of Jay himself, his own reluctance to… well, be around at all. “Jay wouldn’t wish this life on anyone, the nights he sits in his backyard, staring up at the sky, wanting, stars and all, to pull the whole thing back like the lid of a tin can, anything to see his wife again.”
She pulls it off with panache, whether it’s detailing the logistics of single parenthood, and managing to find childcare while in the middle of a murder investigation, or bringing her cast of characters to vivid life with small, unobtrusive brush strokes.
It takes Locke just a line to detail the misery of Alicia’s mother in a way that’s hard to blot out – “She keeps rubbing her hands along the front of her thighs and rocking back and forth in the chair, her body moving on memory, old muscles aching for the child she once rocked in her arms” – or to make real, unsentimentally, the tragedy Jay’s children are facing daily. Houston, too, is depicted in all its shades of grey, its crime problem “as much a part of its cultural identity as its love of football and line dancing, barbecue and big hair”.
It is wonderful to see Jay, her “rabble-rouser [turned] lawyer with a conscience”, again, and to see him where he belongs, “stirring shit the fuck up”, as his friend and investigator Rolly tells him. Here’s hoping he’ll be back soon: Locke is a seriously impressive writer.
Pleasantville by Attica Locke (Profile Books, £14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
