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Summary: A lesson before reading: pick up "To Kill a Mockingbird" instead
Comment: There's a quote from a review by the Independent on the cover of my copy of "A Lesson Before Dying," and it says "Like the best country songs, straight and true." Since I saw and read that quote every time I picked up the book, I inevitably started to evaluate it's merit based on whether or not I agreed with that review. Was it straight and true? Then I realized, more importantly, does that even matter?
"A Lesson Before Dying" is a good book. It's not a great book, or an instant classic, and I don't necessarily think it should be made mandatory reading in schools all over. But it wasn't awful, it didn't have me struggling to get through it, or hating the characters, or not curious about the outcome. It was a three-star book, and here's why.
Grant Wiggins is a schoolteacher who left his home town to go to college, then came back to that same small, racist Louisiana town to teach at the local school for black children. He didn't have to come back, and once he does, he complains often and continually talks about running away and leaving. But when Jefferson, a young man Grant is connected to through a family friend, gets wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to death, Grant must stay to help him "become a man" before going to his death.
Religion seems to be a primary focus of the narrator, and many of the secondary characters get into it with him about how he's godless and he is steering Jefferson wrong by not putting more emphasis on praying and repenting. His method of quiet self-reflection gets through to Jefferson more than any of the religious attitudes, yet our narrator is basically still condemned and he also beats himself up over not being a believer. It seemed strange and slightly unreal to me.
The notion that ultimately we control how we live our lives and our attitudes toward ourselves and others, even on death row, is an interesting one. However, for whatever reason, Gaines could not get me to care much about any of these characters. Certainly, I felt bad for Jefferson for being sent to death by a white racist jury, and I had sympathy for his godmother who wanted only to see him walk upright with dignity to his own death before she passed. But I had a difficult time relating to the characters' struggles.
Truth be told, if being "straight and true" really is what makes a book great, then this one is not. Still, it read quickly and it still has me pondering its meaning, so in that sense, it is a good, three-star book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Lesson Before Dying is a lesson for us all.
Comment: This story is set in 1940s Louisiana. A young black man is with friends who plan and execute a robbery--which goes bad quickly. The young man, Jefferson, is quickly arrested and tried for murder--even though he had no weapon and was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Grant Wiggins, a young black teacher who is chafing at the racial inequality of the times. He'd like nothing more than to leave this racial backwater bayou and head north for a city with more equality. But Jefferson's grandma is a family friend, and she begs Grant for the things he can provide--knowledge, dignity, and the ability for her grandson to die like a man...not the "hog" the white racists have called him. Very well-written, not preacher-like, I enjoyed this novel immensely. It shows us the frailty of humanity, along with the strength of human dignity. This novel should sit on everyone's shelf of books that made them think.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not a "must read" book but not terrible
Comment: The thought process and inspiration behind A Lesson Before Dying were brilliant; however, the story just fell flat. I felt that the characters were one-dimensional and disengaged one from the story; Grant was a bore, for example, he repeated the same lines and the same ideas, most of the time in the same words. I kept waiting for spectacular and inspiring events to occur and to make me feel proud of Grant's work to reach Jefferson, but I was severely disappointed. This story moved water-drop slow, trickling from one important event through insignificant episodes to another important event. While I do feel that stories need time to develop the characters; however, in this story, I didn't see much character development. At the end of the book, Grant was the same man, same selfish mannerisms, yet in life, people change all the time. I would think that witnessing an execution and the injustice of the death penalty would be enough to change most people for better or worse. Then the story became absurd when Jefferson, an ignorant teenager who was brainwashed by a racist society, transformed into a man overnight because Grant made an inspiring speech to him. Why should Jefferson listen to Grant, who happens to be a selfish, cowardly and "educated" black? This book disappointed due to the fact that exaggerations are laced throughout, and it only delved into skin-deep into the death penalty issues. The story contains few descriptions of the execution (the climax), and so many descriptions of tedious events such as Grant's brawl with two bricklayers. Jefferson's execution was brief at best; it just didn't achieve the heart-wrenching ending that it was supposed to accomplish. Save your money and buy a book like Rain of Gold that can achieve true engagement between reader, characters and story; nevertheless, guaranteeing a first person perspective of the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Lesson Indeed
Comment: This book seems to have been created for the express purpose of selling a film option and padding the Oprah Winfrey Book Club list. Trite, sentimental, peopled with unmemorable characters, and written in a flat and artless style, 'A Lesson Before Dying' is a lesson to avoid. Skip class at the Ernest J. Gaines school of writing, go down the road and jump the fence at Harold Bloom's orchard to pick something from Western Canon instead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tried, But Failed to Understand The Hype
Comment: I picked up this book with great anticipation, as I knew it was selected for Oprah's Book Club and had won a couple of awards, including the National Book Award. Although I had never read any of the writer's previous works, his name is familiar and so, naturally, I assumed I would be in for a dramatic and stunning emotional rollercoaster. I wasn't.
This book is so poorly written I really hope that my suspicions are true and that all the pages of the original text were replaced by a 15 year old promising prankster. While the main premise of the book has the potential to be a real winner, Gaines fails to give it the depth it really needs. Instead, he treads above the surface throughout the entire book, using superficial emotions with superficial, and stereotypical, vocabulary. At the end, we get what everyone expects, the standard tearjerker in a Lifetime movie. The book was a chore to read, with Gaines' digressions making it nearly unbearable (must we know about every single person that attended the school play, and must we go through the play in its entirety?).
Nevertheless, Gaines does have an incredible way of making the story seem realistic. The main character, Grant Wiggins, is clearly not a writer yet when he telling the story it is as if he were simply talking to an old friend. Still, while Wiggins is not a writer, Ernest J. Gaines is, and an established one too. One would've hoped that a man with his clout would give us the mature literary quality one expects. Instead, we have this overwrought and sluggish lump of a book that has the potential to be refined into a literary masterpiece yet is nothing more than a bad extension to a Tyler Perry play.
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