Tayari's Blog: It's Review Season: The Boston Globe

'The Untelling' delivers a rich,complex story of secrets, tragedy

By Joanne Skerrett, Globe Staff  |  May 11, 2005

The Untelling, By Tayari Jones, Warner, 336 pp., $24.95

Tayari Jones's sophomore novel, ''The Untelling," attempts to do a lot with a little and succeeds mightily. Jones paints a portrait of a family trapped in a painful past and a young woman beset by the aftermath of a wounding childhood tragedy in a simply plotted but elegantly told story.

The novel's heroine, Aria Jackson, is a 25-year-old literacy teacher living in a decaying Atlanta neighborhood. Her neighbors include dazed crack addicts. Her students are mostly teenage moms trying to pass the GED. However, amid the blight, she is hopeful and optimistic about most things: that gentrification will improve the neighborhood, that she will soon marry her boyfriend, that the class differences between her and her roommate will never become unbearable, and that she can somehow bury her tragic past.

Jones, an award-winning writer, is immensely talented and has a quiet way of dealing with explosive events. The accident that kills Aria's father and baby sister sneaks up on the reader in the beginning of the novel. It will determine much about Aria's future, and the events are narrated with a quiet sorrow, not overwrought with emotion. During the accident the family's terror is almost palpable. Afterward, Aria seems to take on another persona by pretending away the present, a behavior she repeats throughout her childhood and early adulthood.

Aria is not the only one still bearing the weight of the accident. Her sister, Hermione, who found solace by marrying a man old enough to be her father, distances herself from her family. Aria herself escapes to Spelman College but remains racked with guilt as well as an overwhelming sense of responsibility in this proving ground for future great African-American women. Her mother, Eloise, who always seems on the verge of a rage-filled eruption, takes out her pain on her two surviving daughters as they grow up, berating them at every opportunity and locking them out of the house. Making them pay is her way of coping. Even after her daughters leave home, she continues to lash out at them.

Along with depicting the family's turmoil, Jones focuses on the community and its ills -- the changing face of an Atlanta desperately anticipating economic revival in its bleakest and most segregated sections -- and she captures the city's socioeconomic dimensions through her characters. Aria has blue-collar beginnings but a buppie lifestyle. Her locksmith boyfriend is successful but did not attend college and never quite passes social muster with her roommate Rochelle, the epitome of bourgeois African-American society, and Rochelle's dentist fiancé. The novel's title becomes clearer as the narrative rolls along. More family secrets are revealed, and Aria feels that her past has returned when she realizes that her own secret may cause her to lose the man she loves.

Jones is a talent to be reckoned with. Her characterizations are vivid and memorable; her writing is literary but accessible enough that it doesn't crowd out what is truly a wonderful story. She captures Atlanta through several periods and is able to offer a contextual view of the civil rights movement, the mass suburbanization of the city, and classism in the black community. But those topics never overshadow the narrative.