June 17, 2024
A Black WWII veteran becomes enraptured by a carnival performer in the sometimes glimmering but mostly plodding latest from Jones (The Birdcatcher). Buddy Ray Guy, who fought in France as a teenager, travels across Kentucky and Tennessee for tractor repair jobs. During a visit to a traveling carnival, he’s bewitched by the well-manicured and curiously horned Unicorn Woman. He makes it a point to attend every sideshow attraction he can in hopes of seeing the elusive creature once again. In the process, he becomes increasingly fascinated, even visiting a biology professor to ask about the Unicorn Woman’s otherworldly anatomy. The core theme of the Unicorn Woman’s mystery and allure is enticing, but Buddy’s obsessive gaze tends to wear on the reader as the woman's own story remains underdeveloped. Still, Jones’s rich characterizations and wit are on display elsewhere, including in Buddy’s memories of his parents’ concern after he attracted criticism from teachers for growing his hair out like his hero Frederick Douglass (“I know they had barber shops in Mr. Douglass’s days and times,” says his mother). This has its moments, but it doesn’t quite hang together.
July 1, 2024
Jones (The Birdcatcher, 2022) returns with a peripatetic novel that follows a Black veteran as he navigates his way through the 1950s Jim Crow South. Buddy Ray Guy first encounters the carnival attraction known as the Unicorn Woman during a trip through Kentucky. He becomes captivated by her, intrigued by her strange beauty and inaccessibility. "It was sort of an invisible or unspoken rule: you looked but didn't touch, like in a museum with a work of art, even a natural history museum." She comes to embody the unreachable ideal of American life for him. During his wanderings, Buddy ruminates, reminisces about his past, and connects with both eccentric and relatable people--encounters that offer a glimpse of the experiences of returning Black WWII veterans. "We were in some places where people treated us like we weren't even visible . . . And other places where we were too visible." Jones is skilled at balancing the observational with the intimate, and in Buddy we are given a fully realized character who epitomizes the frustrations, heartbreak, and humor of a generation of Black Americans.
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Starred review from July 1, 2024
A surprising, welcome gift from one of America's finest and least predictable writers. This chronicle of a Black GI's return to the American South after World War II provides Jones with the occasion to kick back and gently unravel the story of Buddy Ray Guy, an erstwhile Army cook and tractor repairman, who's on something of a quest to find the book's eponymous "Unicorn Woman," whom he first beholds, albeit from odd angles, at a carnival near his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. Though he can see the "spiraled horn" protruding from the woman's forehead, Buddy is just as astonished by the "slender, dimpled arms [that] were the color of my own" since he's more used to finding "white freaks" at carny sideshows. From then on, the enigmatic woman stalks Buddy's dreams as he makes his way from Kentucky to Memphis, trying to parlay the mechanical skills he picked up in the military into a full-time civilian living in a postwar America still tethered to racial segregation. When Buddy confesses his obsession with the spiral-horned woman to Esta, his sometime girlfriend, she chalks it up to Buddy's wildly romantic imagination: "You are more of a freedom seeker...than a unicorn seeker, Buddy Ray," she tells him. "I don't know whether freedom seekers are ever truly satisfied." Nevertheless, not even the vicissitudes of Jim Crow America can keep Buddy from following through on his dreams, whether they involve conversing with the elusive unicorn woman or figuring out how to make the best use of his craft. All the while, Jones weaves a captivating tapestry of African American life in the 1940s from Buddy's dreams and the wide-ranging information he collects on his quest throughout the mid-South from friends and relatives. He keeps his eyes and ears open to all manner of input, whether it comes from fragments of an Amos 'n' Andy radio broadcast or from the folk wisdom he gathers at restaurants, homes, and places of worship. Most of all, it's Buddy's narrative voice--digressive, reflective, witty, and wise--that sustains one's attention and affection throughout this warm, savory evocation of the elegiac, the fantastic, and the historic. Even when she dials down the intensity, Jones is capable of quiet astonishment.
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April 5, 2024
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Jones (The Birdcatcher) writes about Black army veteran Buddy Ray Guy, who returns home to a Jim Crow community rather than accolades. As he searches for love, meaning, and a mythical ideal, he also reminisces about his time in postwar France and those he met, including the Unicorn Woman. Prepub Alert.
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