Late City: A Novel

by Robert Olen Butler

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author shares an “exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait” of one man’s troubled century (Booklist, starred review).

At 115 years old, former newspaperman Sam Cunningham is also the last surviving veteran of World War I. As he prepares to die in a Chicago nursing home, the results of the 2016 presidential election come in—and he finds himself in a wide-ranging conversation with a surprising God. As the two review Sam’s life, the grand epic of the twentieth century comes sharply into focus.

Sam grows up in Louisiana under the flawed morality of an abusive father. Eager to escape, Sam enlists in the army while still underage. Though the hardness his father instilled in him helps him make it out of World War I alive, it also prevents him from contending with the emotional wounds of war. Back in the United States, Sam moves to Chicago to begin a career as a newspaperman that will bring him close to the major historical turns of the twentieth century. There he meets his wife and has a son, whose fate counters Sam’s at almost every turn.

As he contemplates his relationships—with his parents, his brothers in arms, his wife, his editor, and most importantly, his son—Sam is amazed at what he still has left to learn about himself after all these years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802158833
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/22/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	294
Sales rank:	385,211
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of eighteen previous novels, including Hell, A Small Hotel, and Perfume River. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process, From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Editorial Reviews

07/05/2021

Pulitzer winner Butler steps away from his Christopher Marlowe Cobb series for a moving tale of love and misunderstanding. In 2016, Sam Cunningham, 115 and dying in a nursing home, is visited by God, who interviews him as if for a story (“I want you to talk to me, Samuel. About your life. On the record”). In 1917, Sam flees Louisiana and his racist abusive father to enlist in the Army. After the war, Sam lands a job as a reporter in Chicago and marries Colleen, who in 1922 delivers their only child, Ryan. Sam loves his wife and son, but is unable or unwilling to recognize their true natures, or to grasp why Colleen married him. As WWII looms, Sam tries to prepare the sensitive Ryan for battle. (“I just want you to have the best chance to fully become what you are,” he says, unaware of the irony.) Determined to make his father proud, Ryan joins the Navy in 1940, and what happens to him during the war will change everyone in the family. The God character at first seems a superfluous narrative artifice, but Butler mines the device for an elegant pair of revelations about Colleen and Ryan. Readers with the patience for an old man’s stubbornness will appreciate the redemption herein. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Late City:

“This grandly retrospective novel warns of the political consequences of failures of personal insight.”—New Yorker

“As I devoured the story, I had to wipe away tears more than once. The narrative’s emotional power is fully earned, never manipulated, and Butler’s elegant language is true to the tongue. His research blends so seamlessly into the story that one is inclined, at times, to believe it isn’t fiction at all. Late City is an honest, poignant reckoning of what it means to gaze unblinkingly at our own failings and to find transcendence.”—Historical Novel Society

“It’s God, the supercilious wit who rules the center of Late City…While it has a consistently subtle profundity, Late City isn’t exactly a Novel of Ideas — it’s too entertaining and accessible for that, especially with jagged bolts of wry comedy dispensed by God.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“An engaging read and a commendable quest into the underpinnings of the complicated, often contradictory American people. More crucially, the novel is a poignant meditation on the circle of life, the wonder we all feel as it slips away.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“In other novels, notably Perfume River, Butler explores the devastation that war inflicts on individuals. With Late City, he focuses instead on the inner life of one fallible, lovable, redeemable man over 12 tumultuous decades, a soul forever striving to be a right guy.”—Chapter 16

“With two dozen remarkably imaginative and empathic fiction titles to his credit, Butler brings preternatural attunement to the spiraling of the mind and ardently honed artistry to this exceptionally nuanced, tender, funny, tragic, and utterly transfixing portrait of a man reflecting on more than a century's worth of horror and wonder.”—Booklist, starred review

“A moving tape of love and misunderstanding.”—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Robert Olen Butler:

"Butler's prose is fluid, and his handling of his many time-shifts as lucid as it is urgent. His descriptive gifts don't extend just to his characters' traits or their Florida and New Orleans settings, but to the history he's addressing . . . 'You share a war in one way,' Robert thinks. 'You pass it on in another.' Perfume River captures both the agony and subtlety of how that happens." —New York Times Book Review, on Perfume River

"Butler roves gracefully . . . across the perspectives of many characters, showing particular tenderness." —New Yorker, on Perfume River

"No synopsis can convey the deceptive richness of Butler's storytelling. The writing style, precise and beautiful, discloses more than the simple surface action of any one passage . . . [A] quietly bristling book . . . Perfume River tells a human story that sums up in an entire era of American life." —Miami Herald, on Perfume River

"The story builds its force with great care . . . Its power is that we want to keep reading. The entire journey is masterfully rendered, Butler lighting a path back into the cave, completely unafraid." —Washington Post, on Perfume River

"Butler's assured, elegant novel explores a family fractured by the Vietnam War as its members face the losses of age . . . Eddying fluidly through its half-century span, the book speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others." —Publishers Weekly, on Perfume River

"The climactic scene . . . is devastating and beautifully written. Many weighty themes . . . the shadow of Vietnam, the push and pull of father-son relationships, the pitfalls of long-term marriages, and the psychic toll of aging . . . Butler pulls it all together into a story that's both complex and meaningful." —Kirkus Reviews, on Perfume River

"What I so like about Perfume River is its plainly-put elegance. Enough time has passed since Viet Nam that its grave human lessons and heartbreaks can be—with a measure of genius—almost simply stated. Butler's novel is a model for this heartbreaking simplicity and grace." —Richard Ford, on Perfume River

"Butler does a terrific job of depicting both the journalist's facility for teasing information from his subjects and the spy's incessant fear of being discovered. There's something almost magical about the way the author re-creates this 1915 milieu." —Wall Street Journal, on The Empire of Night

"This high-spirited adventure by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is an antic concoction of genre clichés, literary sendups, personal homages, fanciful history and passages of great writing." —New York Times Book Review, on The Hot Country

"[Butler's] writing is both crisp and thoughtful, his people ring true and he offers an amusing portrait of a golden age in journalism." —Washington Post, on The Hot Country

"Butler's elegant writing elevates the book . . . he is a master of everything from lyrical description to believable dialogue." —Tampa Bay Times, on The Empire of Night

"A smart and layered yarn . . . propulsive reading . . . Butler has developed a knack for snapping off taut, Hammett-esque sentences at tense moments." —Minneapolis Star Tribune, on The Empire of Night

"The novel commingles character-driven historical fiction with melodrama. . . [Butler] holds the reader transfixed, like a kid at a Saturday matinee." —Booklist (starred review), on The Star of Istanbul

"Robert Olen Butler is having fun in The Hot Country and readers will too. An intelligent entertainment with colorful history." —Joseph Kanon, on The Hot Country

From the Publisher

2021-08-18
A 115-year-old newspaperman looks back on both his life and a century of American-made toxic masculinity.

Sam Cunningham, the narrator of this high-concept historical novel, is the last living World War I veteran. As the story opens, on the night of Donald Trump’s election as president, he’s in a retrospective, embittered mood. He recalls his childhood in Louisiana with his closed-off, racist father, his stint in the war as a crack Army sniper, and, most prominently, his career at a Chicago newspaper, rising from cub reporter to editor-in-chief. Butler, who in recent years has focused on historical thrillers, is attuned to the details of war zones and the journalism world, emphasizing how we fail to see history’s cruelest men in the moment. Turning a blind eye to mobsters like Al Capone, fascists like Hitler, and demagogues like Huey Long as they emerged, Butler suggests, is an American tradition that led directly to Trump. Butler is strongest, though, when he approaches the theme from a more intimate perspective: the way Sam’s father rationalized lynchings and how the hypermasculine newsroom environment distanced him from his own son. (Sam's wife, Colleen, who first took him in as a boarder after the war, is a sensible sounding board with a progressive streak.) The novel’s conceit—Sam’s extreme age and debates with God during his long night of the soul—fits somewhat awkwardly over the more domestic details, and Butler telegraphs plot turns that make the story feel predictable. But the novel is affecting as Sam’s private reckoning with what Colleen calls his “ ‘be a man’ crusade,” recalling the better work of the late Ward Just, who wrote similar novels about fathers, sons, and (often misguided) senses of duty.

Sage historical fiction that gets into the emotional grit behind major news events.

Kirkus Reviews