Such Sweet Thunder

"Carter had finished Such Sweet Thunder in 1963, but by 1970 he had given up trying to find a publisher for it. Most unpublished manuscripts stay that way for a reason; Such Sweet Thunder is an exception. The novel . . . is a dense and vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads. Carter's choice of period is felicitous. The Kansas City that he describes is in its bustling, bloody heyday, a town where gangsters are gunned down in the streets, Joe Turner plays on the radio, and children wander home past overrun soup kitchens, clanging streetcars and nightclubs with names like Dante's Inferno. With his fastidious attention to urban detail . . . Carter even resembles another, more famous expatriate, James Joyce. But the novel's real achievement is in its evocation of Amerigo Jones's childhood and his interaction with his parents, Rutherford and Viola, themselves only teenagers when their son's life begins. . . . Carter is in essence a celebratory writer, not a voice of protest, and the thunder that sounds in his novel is meant to evoke the storm of sensation that illuminates American life. . . . Such Sweet Thunder belongs with other enduring documentaries of the dispossessed, like Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Langston Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter." — New York Times Book Review

"The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time to a racially segregated Kansas City in the late 1920s. . . . Seamlessly, gently, Such Sweet Thunder carries Amerigo and us through adolescence, first love and the edge of world war and its sad demands on the safe, secure world Amerigo had come to love. . . . Carter connects all of our childhoods to Amerigo's, while making us feel intensely what made his childhood - Carter's childhood, presumably - as special as it was. The book does his memory proud. And gives our present time a priceless heirloom. The novel arrives late. But it lives." —     Newsday

"The story behind Such Sweet Thunder is almost as captivating as the extraordinary tale told within its pages . . . A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful . . . The novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation. More akin in style to Charles Dickens than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Carter writes prose that tingles with detail . . . Racism certainly stings Amerigo's life, as he finds his opportunities limited by prejudice. But Carter's characters are not, to borrow a famous phrase from Zora Neale Hurston, ‘tragically colored,’ and this frees Amerigo's story from getting mired in a woe-is-me pity party. . . Ambitious and resonant, Such Sweet Thunder often achieves brilliance; at its best, it has the kinetic energy of an August Wilson play. . . . This is a rich addition to our literary understanding of the 20th-century African-American experience." — Boston Globe

"Originally written in 1963 and shelved, this hefty, astonishing novel by a black American expatriate who died in 1983 tells — in electric modernist vernacular prose — the story of a black child's life in Jim Crow America. . . . Through a steady accumulation of detail, sustained lyricism, flights of fancy and, especially, reams of swinging dialogue, Carter paints an uncommonly rich picture of black American family life in the early 20th century. Like the composition it is named for, a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tribute to Shakespeare, it is a marvelous blend of jazz rhythms and high literary tradition. — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This diamond in the rough is an extraordinarily honest and compassionate child’s-eye view of a world too seldom seen in American fiction." — Kirkus Reviews
 
"Readers will appreciate Such Sweet Thunder’s dreamy, nostalgic quality and lyrical writing, which evokes urban life before the war and offers a stirring portrait of a young boy growing up." — Booklist (starred review)

"Infused with the sounds and spirit of Kansas City jazz, the author’s gritty style was ahead of its time." —  Library Journal