Sam is on his death bed and as an editor of a newspaper, he takes us the readers through history and his trials of what he did or did not do. He is asking to make penance in a way. The story is told through the different parts of history which I found to be interesting and also made the book more enjoyable to read. A very good book.

Having met and been impressed by an author it is good to continue to read his work, even if you have to follow his career from afar.

I look out for his latest novel and I have not been disappointed by any that I have subsequently read.

He has an ear for authentic dialogue and an eye for detail and a balanced truth. This latest project allows him to explore recent American history and in Sam Cunningham he has a protagonist who has lived through many of his country’s notable events.

The basis of the novel is a variation of the sense of life after death. A meeting with God to review one’s own actions and relationships where the future is withheld so revisions cannot be made with the benefit of hindsight.

A deep and serious look at relationships as much as attitudes to life and decisions made. It overarches the concept of faith without being religious, focusing on personal responsibility and intent. The author resists the urge to paint a perfect life or play God himself. As a reader you are able to be impartial and reflective as with any autobiography one reads.

Sam is a newspaper man, a journalist working for an Independent Chicago paper. His recollections are a series of clippings replayed from his life with the pain and insight of that time. In this way he isn’t so much rewriting his life story but producing the final print run, the Late City edition. This is a clever approach to the idea of a life passing before your eyes in the moments before death.

This is a very approachable piece of writing. A real sense of our humanity shines through. It is life affirming and challenges each about prejudice and speaking the truth. I loved the touches of humour most notably the timing of death which allowed a liberal journalist witness a new presidents election.

Above all it is an everyday story of human struggle, growing up in the Southern states, going to war and the quest for a work life balance that seldom satisfies. I enjoyed the lack of understanding Sam initially has over the responsibilities he has mismanaged, the time wasted and the prejudice that withheld his support or involvement. Whether spoken or unsaid the perception others make of our own life often does not match our own self estimate. The acts of killing others in the Great War seems to Sam to make him less worthy of mercy or acceptance.

A remarkable and inspiring novel full of insight, language and historical review. Ultimately it is about self awareness, the chance and ability to change but owning our words and actions to our last breath. A book that challenges us to make use of our time; to take personal responsibility and enjoy life for the influence and comfort our presence brings.

A sweeping narrative of a 115 year life lives. This book takes you from the turn of the 20th century to the 2016 election. From Louisiana to New York, this novel is historical fiction at its finest.

This was a tedious rumination on his past by a dying 115 year old man. The premise is that he is taking to God. That felt weird and awkward. It was a short book, but it felt long and slow. Obviously, a lot of readers love this author, but his writing style is not for me. I tried him once before and didn’t like that book either. I received a free copy of this audiobook from the publisher.

Sam Cunningham is dying and as he lies on his deathbed in a Chicago nursing home, in the long dark night of the soul, he reflects and reminisces and reviews his long life – all 115 years of it – and discusses all that he has experienced with a rather unusual God, who has come to speed him on his way. A chatty God is a risky narrative conceit, but I found it worked well and for me it paid off, giving Sam an interlocutor to help him reassess, and I found their exchanges amusing. But this isn’t just a saccharine account of an old man at the end of his life, but as we look back with Sam we too relive the events of the 20th century and we too reassess some of those events. I found the book engaging and entertaining, but with a serious and thoughtful aspect to it as well, and overall a really great read.

This is my first time reading a Robert Olen Butler novel. In this latest novel, Late City, Butler writes about Sam Cunningham, a 115 year old man who is preparing to die. But before G-D allows him to die, he has to look back at all of his significant relationships, with: his parents, his fellow brothers in arms, his wife, his editors, and most importantly, his son. By looking back on his life, Sam finally learns what it means to be present for others. he learns the importance of love, and compassion. this story will touch your heart. It touched mine!

Thank you @netgalley and @groveatlantic for the my complimentary copy of #latecity in return for my honest review. #5stars

Late City by Robert Olen Butler is about a 115-year old Sam Cunningham in 2016 following the presidential election. While approaching death, he converses with God, who allows him to revisit scenes throughout his life in stream of consciousness. Sam is a newspaper writer by trade and tells the stories of his life in the rapidly changing 20th and 21st centuries. These scenes illustrate the breadth of his life and provide insight into formative experiences and relationships.

The beginning was a little slow for me, but picked up about 1/3 in and I became more interested in the events that shaped his life and way of thinking. I really liked how his life as a progressive newsman intersected with social and civil progress. The most affecting and poignant experiences were about his family and war. I loved the thoughtfulness of Sam and pondering how we perceive our actions and what happens to us. I listened to the audiobook which was well narrated by Danny Campbell and seemed like an excellent fit for Sam Cunningham.

Thank you Grove Atlantic / Highbridge Audio and NetGalley for providing this ebook and audiobook ARC.

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 7, 2021

Robert Olen Butler’s new novel explores the harm caused by a parental or social insistence that “real men” must behave in a way that allows the world to witness and appreciate their manliness. More broadly, Butler suggests that harm is done whenever people of either gender are made to deny their true selves.

While the novel’s title may have more than one meaning, the obvious reference is to the late city edition of a newspaper — the edition that comes at the end of the news day, the one that reports all the day’s events, when it’s too late to add anything new. After 115 years, Samuel Cunningham is at the end of his life, looking back at key events as if they were a series of news stories, the late city edition that recounts all of the news of a life that’s worth reporting.

Sam recounts those stories from a nursing home bed, where he resides as the last living veteran of the First World War. He reviews significant episodes in his life because it is finally time to die. A gender-fluid God (“don’t concern yourself with pronouns,” God tells Sam) is in the room as Sam approaches death, forcing him to give an accounting of his life, to voice his regrets and admit his mistakes, to gain an understanding of his relationships with his parents, wife, and son before God determines Sam’s eternal fate. Since the story is told from Sam’s perspective, whether or not God is actually present or the manifestation of a dying delusion isn’t important. Real or imagined, God is a device that prompts Sam’s self-critical evaluation of his life.

On its surface, Sam has lived a fine life. He grew up in Louisiana, where his father taught him to hunt with a rifle. Seeing his father abuse his mother but being too afraid to intervene, Sam lies about his age and joins the Army as World War I begins, sneaking off in the night, saying goodbye only to his mother, protecting her with a postcard to make his father believe that she had no advance knowledge of his plan.

Using the hunting skills he learned from his father, Sam becomes a sniper. He kills more than a hundred men, envisioning one of them as his father, a vision that doesn’t stop him from pulling the trigger. Sam learns that war is about “millions of men being forced to become somebody who has to dig a hole in the ground and then go down in it or jump up out of it and die a ferocious, savaging death when you just want to be a farmer or a teacher or a sale clerk or a guy stoking coal in a tramp steamer.” People not being allowed to be who they want to be, and how that denial of self-determination harms society as much as the individual, is one of the novel’s key themes.

Sam befriends a man who gives comfort to wounded soldiers in the trenches, hugging them and even kissing them when they believe they are being held by their mothers. When it comes time for Sam to do the same for his friend, Sam needs to ask himself whether he is capable of that kind of intimacy.

At the war’s end, Sam moves to Chicago, a destination far from Loouisiana. He has long loved newspapers and has a talent for writing, his only talent apart from killing. He finds a room in the home of a war widow, earns a job as a cub reporter at a progressive newspaper by writing a sensitive piece about the city’s race riots, marries and has a son. In another key scene, when his son is eleven, Sam explains that being a man means having the courage to kill other men to protect a country. That discussion, a few years later, motivates Sam’s son to join the Navy just before the US enters World War II.

From the end of the war until Sam’s visit from God, shortly after Trump’s election, Sam lives with the consequences of how he shaped his son’s life. It is only at the end of Late City that Sam comes to understand the truth about his son, to understand the harm to which he has contributed by failing to love him unconditionally and with his whole heart. He has a similar revelation about his wife, about how his and society’s expectations shaped the woman she became.

Late City isn’t a story about toxic masculinity. Sam is a decent but misguided man, a product of his time who, by rejecting racism, is a better man than many of his peers. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He truly loves his wife, even if he gives more attention to his career than to her. He wants to observe the world and report it rather than being part of it. But Sam could have been more than decent. He could have been a helper, not just an observer. He could have been more open and accepting.

After Sam learns those lessons by considering his life in retrospect, the novel’s final pages give Sam a small opportunity for redemption. That's a sweet and touching moment.

The story concentrates on Sam’s life from the First to the Second World War. The years that follow feel rushed, although they do bring Sam’s wife and marriage into sharper focus.

I caught myself holding my breath during a few tense moments in Late City. At other points, I was genuinely moved by the story. I disagree with the New York Times reviewer who called the novel outrageously sentimental. It isn’t a literary sin for authors to make readers feel something. Obvious emotional manipulation for its own sake is a drag, but the emotional response that Butler induces comes from a place of honesty. I did not feel manipulated by forced sentiment. Rather, I empathized with Sam’s belated realizations that, at three or four times in his life, he was less of a man than he should have been, no matter how many enemy soldiers he managed to kill.

The novel’s honesty extends beyond Sam’s examination of his own life and becomes a commentary on a society that forces good people to lose their own identities by conforming to standards imposed by others. Perhaps readers who cling to antiquated standards will deny the truth or the beauty of Late City. Readers with open minds might appreciate this heartfelt story of the mistakes a decent man can make during a long life.

RECOMMENDED

The synopsis offered for LATE CITY was so intriguing that I was eager to read author Robert Olen Butler’s newest book. The oldest living WWI vet, upon Trump’s election in November 2016, reviews his life as he approaches death. His review is a conversation, of sorts, with himself or God. But, honestly, the conversation and the ensuing book, is incredibly tedious. This is just a long, slow book without much of a payoff. I received my copy from the publisher from NetGalley.

I found this novel rough going at the start, but sticking with it was so worth it. Having enjoyed Robert Olen Butler's previous works, especially "A Small Hotel" I was drawn to request this Advanced Readers Copy, with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Grove Atlantic.

Sam Cunningham is the oldest living WWI veteran, lying in his nursing home bed at 116 in 2016. The novel proceeds as a conversation with God in which Sam reaches a reckoning on his life, resolving issues with his father, his mother, his wife and his son. He watches events of his years unfold as if he does not know their outcomes as they happen, reliving his reactions and judging his own words and actions. He lived his life as a newsman, reporting on Al Capone and Hughey Long, and then as an editor and an editor in chief. Many of his memories appear to him as if they are headlines in the Late City edition of the Cunningham News, as well as the actual headlines announcing wars, elections, and other world events. He comes to realize his own short comings and faults, where he fell short and where he can still, on his deathbed, still atone and correct his behaviors.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for this arc.

This novel spans the long lifetime of Sam as he recounts the political, historical, and personal events that have shaped his life. Although the writing was good, the pace was slow at times and I found myself a little bogged down by the historical aspects. I think it's a good book for someone who loves and appreciates historical fiction. Overall it was an okay read - not bad, but not a new favorite either.

I thought I had read some Robert Olen Butler back in the eighties but none of his huge list of works chimes with me, so "Late City," written at age 70, could be a first for me. And I'm delighted. A decidedly literary novel, written from a hazy but erudite viewpoint of a dying 115-year-old man on the eve of Trump, it posits a final earthly dialogue with God (a decidedly jaded deity), which then sashays through our hero's life. A country boy, a soldier, a newsman, a husband, an old person's home resident … all these phases of his life are recalled, reflected upon, and synthesized. Butler is a poetic stylist and his dreamlike scenes are a pleasure to read. A final mild plot twist failed to excite me, and somehow a century of recollections about America did not amount to much more than broad opinions on war and race, but overall, Late City is a minor readerly pleasure.

Looking back on his life following the 2016 election, Sam Cunningham offers over a century of American history through the eyes of a single character. It’s an epic, to be sure, and appealing to history buffs. But, for me, this one fell a little flat.

A panoramic view of American history through the eventful 20th century as told by Sam Cunningham, a former newspaperman as he lay dying at the age of 116 on the eve of Donald Trump's victory to the WH. Sam's conversation with God as he chronologically recalls his personal and professional life from the dawn of last century to 2016 can be at times exhilarating and sad but also very tedious and downright boring. Robert Olen Butler is a fantastic writer and this novel might actually be his big American opus but unfortunately you may need to muster lots of patience and plenty of forbearance in order to make it through the end. I had some difficulties at times with the self absorbing ego of the protagonist and a personal narrative that threatens too many times to get bogged down into fictional navel gazing. A literary tendency that I profoudly dislike and constantly decry overhere in France when it comes to contemporary fiction. Hopefully it won't become a new trend in American letters in the future.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for this ARC