In the fictional town of Prestonville, N.C., in spring 1963, black teenager and budding musician Larry Lime Nolan apprentices himself to an old musician named the Bleeder. Under the Bleeder’s expert tutelage, Larry realizes how much he’s got to learn and discovers a whole new reason to learn it: jazz.
Meanwhile, a white teenager named Dwayne Hallston - with whom Larry shares a clandestine friendship - starts a band called the Amazing Rumblers. Dwayne is determined to take the band beyond Pat Boone songs and show tunes. He has discovered James Brown, and with coaching from Larry Lime, he has the Rumblers practice every number on the album “Live at the Apollo.’’ Dwayne won’t rest until they can perform every one exactly like Brown and the Famous Flames.
Larry and Dwayne’s collaboration is only a faint echo of the changes taking place in the outside world: The lunch counter sit-ins are underway, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is writing the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’ and in two months Medgar Evers will be murdered in his driveway. Nevertheless, Larry and Dwayne are about to find out their subversive friendship and a white kid singing black music are still too much for Prestonville to handle.
“The Night Train’’ is a poignant depiction of a small community on the edge of irreversible change. Edgerton masterfully conveys the reality of everyday Southern life in the early ’60s, from the hot, smelly jobs most people worked to the simple pleasures such as roller skating rinks, backyard basketball, and the homespun character of local television.
But this is not just a novel of social history. “The Night Train’’ is also a book about some of the most private and precious of individual joys, a snapshot of the moments that too few adolescents are lucky enough to have: the moment when they discover something that they are not only good at but that they also love, and when they learn that art - be it music, literature, or film - can not only reveal new worlds, but also touch parts of themselves they didn’t know existed.
When Larry Lime listens to Thelonious Monk, the experience is nothing less than an epiphany: “He felt a magic in “Blue Monk’’ that he’d not known before with any church songs, or blues, or from anywhere else… . It moved to places he expected it to move, but then it didn’t. He felt the strange rhythm shift at the end of the first time through … and he knew it belonged… . He wanted to play it, wanted to understand that rhythm shift, to make that a part of what he knew, could play. He felt that Mr. Monk had written it for him.’’
So many novelists strive to capture such events on the page, the hours and times that shape the rest of someone’s life. Most of them fail. A novel containing moments like this is nothing less than a gift.
Kevin O’Kelly can be reached at rkokelly@gmail.com.
