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Mr. T once said: ''Don't be a fool, stay in school''. It's something I took way too seriously, so I remained in school for 21 years and ended up with a master degree that I'll never have any use for. I thought I could eschew the responsibilitie of adulthood through academia and discipline, but I was so wrong. The point I'm trying to make here is that I was a confused young man and that school didn't help sorting things out one bit for me. You know what confused me too? THE BLACK HOUR, by Lori Rader-Day. It's not a bad novel at all. It has some genuinely enthusiasming aspects even. But it gyrates so much, I found it difficult to understand what it actually is and what it's trying to say.
Dr. Amelia Emmet is teaching sociology in college. Her specialty? Sociology of violence. Amelia has been gunned down by a random student * the previous year, leaving her in pain and with a physical disability. She now needs a cane to move around. She's also at the center of campus gossips. Everybody has a theory about why she got shot, except her. Enters a new graduate student from out of town named Nathaniel Barber. Nath is passionate with sociology of violence, but he's also fascinated, borderline obsessed with the attack Amelia was a victim of. Sometimes, you need the input of somebody else to help you understand what happened to you, even if that person doesn't exactly know what she's walking into herself.
So what is THE BLACK HOUR exactly? Is it a campus novel about collective trauma? Not really, because it focuses almost exclusively on Amelia Emmet's experience. Is it a literary novel about sociology of violence? No, it's not. There is very little actual sociology in THE BLACK HOUR **.Is it a mystery? Kind of, yet the bulk of its effort focuses on Amelia courageously piecing her life back together. The narrative of THE BLACK HOUR goes in several directions but never commits to one, so it's spinning on itself a lot, like a record. It's frustrating, because it kept trumping my expectations, which is good, and yet it takes forever to lead to somewhere in particular, which is bad. It doesn't seem to know what direction to go.
I have to say though, while the mystery elements were too scracely scattered in Lori Rader-Day's ultra character-driven approach, they were actually good. THE BLACK HOUR takes the scenic route to solve its own intrigue, but it does deliver in explaining the attack on Amelia. That is the central mystery of THE BLACK HOUR even if sometimes it's easy to forget. There never really is an official investigation going and a lot of the answers are brought through concidental encounters. The attack on Amelia fascinates everybody, but it's kind of taboo and never really discussed in depth until it is fully explained at the end. While it keeps the mystery thick, I believe it deprived THE BLACK HOUR of some very interesting, confrontational scenes if Lori Rader-Day would've chosen a more traditional approach. It's nonetheless worth reading through because once THE BLACK HOUR gets down to business, it gets really cool.
I'm being Captain Nit-Picky here, but I had a good time with THE BLACK HOUR. I wouldn't have finished it in two sittings if I didn't. It's an interesting experiment in dual narration and genre fiction. While it was a little too coincidental for my own taste, I liked how it took two people to piece up what happened to Amelia, implicitly highlighting the impossibility of facing such a violent ordeal alone. The content left me perplex, but the execution was refreshing and kept my attention despite a couple head scratchers. One thing though, shouldn't it be called THE DARK HOUR? THE BLACK HOUR makes it sound like a special episode of soul train.
* A student named Leonard Lehane. I got a kick out of that.
** It made me smile that Nathaniel Barber was so passionate about sociology. Most student in this department usually have no idea how they ended up there.