The Night Bird Cantata

by Donald Rawley

Book Overview

In a debut novel of startling lyrical power, author Donald Rawley re-creates the long, hot Southwestern summer of 1968 through the eyes of ten-year-old Lindsay Paul (L.P.) Fowler, a hard, pretty, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380976099
• ISBN13: 9780380976096
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Lyrical, masterful, devastating.

"It was the summer of my mother's second husband. It was the summer of full moons, night birds and paralyzed daylight; I discovered absence and the magic of pain, gifts that only the unloved can unwrap and save as something precious." This short, opening paragraph will tell you whether you want to read this book or not. It told me I **had** to read it, and I plunged into one of the most accomplished, vividly realized, and devastating novels I've ever read. Narrated by an adult L. P., the novel recounts one sweltering childhood summer in Phoenix, Arizona, when the two narcissitic women who rule his life - his neurotic, dependent, barely functional mother and his cruel, ice-hearted grandmother ("a tarantula in mink") - leave L. P. in the care of Betty, their black housekeeper, while they each pursue their own agendas. As an effeminate white boy in Betty's black world, L. P. experiences - for the first time - a responsible adult's love, a love as devoid of sentimentality as it is of hypocrisy. He is also introduced, briefly, to a world of sexuality that he cannot yet comprehend or enter into. But he is old enough to come to understand that his "difference" separates him, forever, from so-called "normal" people. In the last two, heartbreaking chapters, L. P. returns to his mother and grandmother, and comes face to face with the finality of their emotional abandonment. Yet, in a suspenseful denouement, he is able to assess the damage and carry on. This novel is set in Phoenix. But with its strong women, marginalized sexuality, overlapping but separate worlds of black and white, and sweltering heat, the novel is Southern Gothic in tone. The writing is lyrical, poetic, and occasionally over-rich and strained but not often. The adult L. P. describes his own childhood world with dead-center precision, as he experienced it, with the unflinching clarity achieved after long reflection, and without a trace of self-pity. Rawley's death in 1998 was a tragedy, first and deepest for his friends and loved ones, but also for those of us who love to read.

An Impressive First Novel

From the opening paragraph (above) of The Night Bird Cantata (1998) by Donald Rawley, readers will know they have entered a magical world of wonderful writing. Filled with metaphor and simile, The Night Bird Cantata is the fictional memoir of the summer in 1968 that L.P. (short for Lindsay Paul) spends with his grandmother's black maid in Phoenix. Separated from his mother who has had the "scent of a man drifting through" her "hair for almost six months," and who has married "a timid Irishman" named Bob Rafferty, L.P. finds himself shipped off to "the wrong side of the tracks" in a segregated city where "colored people lived south of the Gila River, a dry, shabby canal, only good for floods." At the age of ten, L.P. spends "three months of days whose clarity is both perverse and frightening, held without photographs or postcards or any other telling semblance to prove I existed, there, in Phoenix in 1968, and that I survived." Kept away from his real dad because "he isn't a nice man. he's a liar and he hits people," L.P.'s mother has remarried because L.P. isn't "masculine enough." "Besides," his mother adds, "I'm pretty sure I love him." L.P. stays with his grandmother's maid, Betty, who once cared for Errol Flynn's son and "played in a band in the late thirties" and is still known to raise her voice in song in church-- if she is sober enough while his mother is on her honeymoon. L.P.'s summer is filled with new discoveries. L.P. gets to be a kid, climb trees, dive into catfish holes dreaming "it was an ocean. Chinese junks were drifting by. There were steamships in the distance. I knew somehow that this canal led west to the ocean. That if I had to, I could swim until I reached the Pacific." L.P. goes to church with Betty and Frank, her husband, realizing he is "the only white boy there. And I liked it. It made me special." Summer is also for going bowling with Betty, her friends, and two boys that L.P. befriends, Samuel and Grover. It is also a summer in which L.P. goes without hearing from his mother for a month. "Sometimes I cried, but by July I began not to care. A clarity had enveloped my legs and arms. My heart followed." It is also during the summer of 1968 that L.P. learns about death and grieving.Running throughout The Night Bird Cantata are two major focuses. One has to do with L.P.'s effeminate nature and the gender confusion which plagues him. In fact, throughout the book he suffers the taunts of his peers for his mannerisms and looks and he wishes that he was a girl, fantasizing about growing up and becoming a beautiful woman like his idol, Sophia Loren. Another theme that runs throughout the book is the fact that L.P. believes he is unloved. Unfortunately, this proves to be true. With the exception of Betty, adults have tolerated L.P. at best, if they haven't openly rejected him. The Night Bird Cantata is such a beautifully written, lyrical novel that readers will be shocked when these two o