THE TULIP POPLARS, a poet's lyrical retelling of a story in every family tree

THE TULIP POPLARS
SILAS HOUSE
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical novel about hidden, forbidden love in the early 1900s by bestselling writer and former poet laureate of Kentucky, Silas House.

Amos and Tom fall in love while working in the tobacco fields during the hot summers of the early 1900s, yet Tom cannot shake his strict religious upbringing nor the responsibilities of his family’s farm. His longtime friend Maeve also pines for a man she can’t have, lest she endanger his already tenuous life in a town and world shaped by racial lines. How do you live a life that feels untrue, and at what point do you risk everything?

The Tulip Poplars is a gorgeous and moving novel spanning most of the 20th century, centering on four people trying to find happiness in a world that demands conventional choices. House tells a deeply intimate story of faith and doubt, race and class, sexual desire and the longing to be good when you’ve been taught that you are evil for loving who you love.

Based on the story of an ancestor, House’s new novel takes us from New York City to Southern cities to Appalachia and will leave you with a bigger heart.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's a lovely, lyrical telling of a story every last one of us, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, has in our direct line of descent. In a world a hostile as it is to same-sex love (let alone sex) the closet has created a lot of unhappy marriages. Statistically there were happy ones, too, but I'm willing to wager there were, and are, fewer of those.

So I was predisposed to like and enjoy the story of the "good" people of Bright Star, Kentucky, and unsurprisingly I did. Especially the men falling in love across class *and* queer prejudice lines. Talk about an uphill battle, though, that's Maeve, a white woman breaking literal Jim Crow laws by indulging in carnal congress with Paschal, the only Black person in her father's Episcopal school. He risks his literal life being with her; she loses social standing by her miscegenation, and becomes a pariah by getting pregnant out of wedlock. Fortunately Paschal's whisked away in 1919 due to the Corbin Expulsion, an appalling event I'd never heard of before. Amos self-exiles to New York City, where revolting incidents of police violence against queers impact (!) his life; Tom's confined to a mental institution to undergo insulin-overdose induced coma to cure him of being queer. (In order to include this nightmarish torture, the author says plainly he moved its US application earlier than it took place in reality, which I appreciated.)

As the escapees from Bright Star form new connections, Tom and Maeve navigate their dishonest marriage, raise a daughter, live lives...longing for others. So very many of us do this. We find the scraps and hidden bits we can enjoy to the degree possible, but happiness is a bit strong of a word for the twilight state of anesthetized misery company, if we're lucky turning into companionship, preents in the absence of a love lost. I know all of us carry some unfixable sadness. Far fewer carry this level of punishing loneliness found in settling.

The role of the piano, whose keys I discuss below, stitches the emotional reality of Bright Star together. I know for sure all y'all will know Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 the instant you hear it. It will be less obvious until you read about the pieces why Author House likely chose them. Safe to say this is the point I fully got on board Author House's Yearning Express.

I've docked a star because on the first page, the first paragraph even, reference to a piano made in the nineteenth century having "Tanzanian ivory" keys caused me to stop reading for weeks. "Tanzania" is a name invented in 1964...during my lifetime. "Tanganyika" was used when it was a German colony in the 19th century, up through independence to the invention of the portmanteau of "Zanzibar" and "Tanganyika." This is easily checked, and as a throwaway line it could've been "African ivory" with no change in meaning. My remaining fraction of a star loss was down to my significantly lower interest and investment in the straight couples.

It's a lovely reading experience, another one of those where I'm compelled to read bits aloud. Normally I'd chuck one in here so you could feel smugly superior about not liking it, but there were six that I could not choose from, so I skipped it.

This caused me significant emotional anguish. It's beautiful writing, and proof one needn't insert weird line-breaks or fail to interconnect the ideas behind the words into grammatically correct sentences to evoke strong emotions and offer beauty to the Muses.

Take note of this before committing Poetry *ptooptoo* again.