CANR
WORK TITLE: TRIAL
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WEBSITE: http://www.richardnorthpattersonbooks.com/
CITY: Martha’s Vineyard
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 337
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Kirkus Reviews June 15, 2023, review of Patterson, Richard North: TRIAL. p. NA.
Publishers Weekly vol. 270 no. 14 Apr. 3, 2023, , “Trial.”. p. 41.
ONLINE
Marth Vineyard Times, https://www.mvtimes.com (June 28, 2023), review of Trial
Richard North Patterson
USA flag (b.1947)
Richard North Patterson is the author of The Spire, Eclipse and fourteen other bestselling and critically acclaimed novels. Formerly a trial lawyer, he was the SEC liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor and has served on the boards of several Washington advocacy groups. He lives in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard with his wife, Dr. Nancy Clair.
Genres: Mystery, Thriller
New Books
June 2023
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Trial
Series
Christopher Paget
1. The Lasko Tangent (1979)
2. Degree of Guilt (1992)
3. Eyes of a Child (1994)
4. Conviction (2005)
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Tony Lord
1. Private Screening (1985)
2. Silent Witness (1996)
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Kerry Kilcannon
1. No Safe Place (1998)
2. Protect and Defend (2000)
3. Balance of Power (2003)
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Blaine Trilogy
1. Fall from Grace (2012)
2. Loss Of Innocence (2013)
3. Eden in Winter (2014)
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Novels
The Outside Man (1981)
Escape the Night (1983)
The Final Judgment (1995)
aka Caroline Masters
Dark Lady (1999)
Exile (2006)
The Race (2007)
Eclipse (2009)
The Spire (2009)
In the Name of Honor (2010)
The Devil's Light (2011)
Trial (2023)
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thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumb
Non fiction
Fever Swamp (2017)
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Omnibus editions
Degree of Guilt / The Final Judgment (2002)
Richard North Patterson
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful.
Find sources: "Richard North Patterson" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Richard North Patterson (born February 22, 1947, in Berkeley, California) is an American fiction writer, attorney and political commentator.
Education and law career
Patterson graduated in 1968 from Ohio Wesleyan University and has been awarded that school's Distinguished Achievement Citation and his national fraternity's Alumni Achievement Award. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and a recipient of that University's President's Award for Distinguished Alumni and its President's Award for Excellence. He has served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securities & Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.; and was the SEC's liaison to the Watergate Special Prosecutor. More recently, Patterson was a partner in the San Francisco office of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen before retiring from practice in 1993. He has served on the boards of his undergraduate and law schools, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, PEN Center West, the Regional Panel For The Selection of White House Fellows, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the Renew Democracy Initiative, and was Chairman of Common Cause, the grassroots citizens lobby founded by John W. Gardner. He now serves on the Advisory Council of J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Writing career
Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; his first short story was published in the Atlantic Monthly; and his first novel, The Lasko Tangent, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1979. Between 1981 and 1985, he published The Outside Man, Escape the Night, and Private Screening, which made the New York Times bestseller list in 1994. His first novel in eight years, Degree of Guilt (1993), and Eyes of A Child (1995), were combined into a four-hour TV mini-series by NBC TV, called Degree of Guilt.[1] Both were international bestsellers, and Degree of Guilt was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1995. The Final Judgment (1995), Silent Witness (1997), No Safe Place (1998), and Dark Lady (1999) all became immediate international bestsellers, and in 2011 Silent Witness became a feature film on TNT. Protect and Defend (2000), about the controversial nomination of the first woman to be Chief Justice, and her entanglement in an incendiary lawsuit regarding late-term abortion and parental consent, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and received a Maggie Award from Planned Parenthood for its treatment of issues regarding reproductive rights. In 2013, the London Guardian Literary Review named No Safe Place one of the 10 best works of fiction, nonfiction, or biography inspired by John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy assassination in the 50 years since his death.
Balance of Power (2003) confronted one of America's most divisive issues—gun violence—and was chosen by USA Today as its book of the month selection for November. Conviction (2005) focused on the law and politics of capital punishment. Exile (2007) dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was nominated for South Africa's leading literary award. The Race (2007) concerned a dramatic campaign for president, and Eclipse (2009) dealt with human rights, Africa, and the geopolitics of oil. The Spire (2009) was a novel of psychological suspense, and In the Name of Honor (2010) portrays a military court martial for murder, and a legal defense based on PTSD. The Devil’s Light (2011) is an exhaustively researched depiction of the world of espionage and the potential for nuclear terrorism, focused on an Al Qaeda plot to steal a nuclear bomb from Pakistan in order to destroy a major western city.
Patterson's twentieth novel, Fall From Grace (2012), a family drama set on Martha's Vineyard, became his sixteenth New York Times bestseller. Its prequel, Loss of Innocence (2013), is a coming-of-age novel set in the tumultuous year of 1968. Its sequel, Eden In Winter (2014), concluded the trilogy. His first novel in nine years, 'Trial', dealt with some of the most salient problems of race in America, and was published in June 2023.
Between September 2015 and May 2021, Patterson devoted his time to political commentary. During the 2015-2016 presidential campaign, Patterson was a contributing opinion writer for the Huffington Post, with a focus on politics and international affairs, as well as a guest commentator on television and podcasts. His book about that campaign, "Fever Swamp", was published in January 2017. Between 2017 and 2019, he was a columnist for the Boston Globe and HuffPost. Between March 2019 and May 2021, he was a columnist for The Bulwark, writing longer essays on politics, law, public policy and geopolitics.[2]
Patterson has appeared on such shows as Today, Good Morning America, The CBS Morning Show, Fox News Sunday, Morning Joe, Inside Politics, Washington Journal, Buchanan and Press, Greta Van Susteren, Fox and Friends, and Hardball. Beyond his regular columns, his articles on politics, society, literature, law, and foreign policy have been published in " The New York Times, the London Times, the "Times Literary Supplement ", The Wall Street Journal, "The Atlantic", USA Today, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, FoxNews.com, Medium, and the San Jose Mercury News. A frequent speaker on political, geopolitical, legal, and social issues, in 2004 Patterson spoke at Washington, D.C. rallies in support of reproductive rights, and against gun violence, and has spoken about the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma at such forums as the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and the World Affairs Council in Dallas. Patterson is a member of the Cosmos Club of Washington DC, and his papers are collected by Boston University. In 2012, Patterson received the Silver Bullet Award from the International Thriller Writers Association for his contributions to the wider community. Overall, the worldwide sales of Patterson's novels exceeds 25 million copies.
Personal life
Patterson has three sons and two daughters. He lives on Martha's Vineyard and Jacksonville, Florida with his wife, Dr. Nancy Clair.{{cite news | last =Shanahan | first =Mark | title =Richard North Patterson aims for something else | newspaper =Boston Globe | date =September 28, 2013 | url =https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/09/27/patterson/WAC6VkmLCp8Yotg4IP6SVK/story.html Education: Ohio Wesleyan University, B.A., 1968; Case Western Reserve University, J.D., 1971. (Encyclopædia Britannica) If a reference can be found, then remove the arrow stuff-->
Bibliography
The following are all novels by the author.
The Lasko Tangent (1979)
The Outside Man (1981)
Escape the Night (1983)
Private Screening (1985)
Degree of Guilt (1993)
Eyes of a Child (1995)
The Final Judgment (1995)
Silent Witness (1997)
No Safe Place (1998)
Dark Lady (1999)
Protect and Defend (2000)
Balance of Power (2003)
Conviction (2005)
Exile (2007)
The Race (2007)
Eclipse (2009)
The Spire (2009)
In the Name Of Honor (2010)
The Devil's Light (2011)
Fall from Grace (2012)
Loss of Innocence (2013) - ISBN 978-1-62365-092-6
Eden in Winter (2014)
" Trial" (2023)
Non-fiction: "Fever Swamp" (2017)
So Why Did Big New York Publishers Reject Richard North Patterson’s New Novel?
Is it because he’s white? Or because it’s not very good?
BY LAURA MILLER
JUNE 20, 202312:38 PM
A blue-tinged image of white novelist Richard North Patterson, wearing a wool coat, staring ahead, while in the background, a police car, its lights on, pulls over a sedan during a snowy winter day.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Acey Harper/Getty Images and Baxternator/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
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In April, Richard North Patterson—author of 16 New York Times bestsellers—published an essay in the Wall Street Journal about his difficulties finding a publisher for his first novel in nine years. The book, Trial, tells the story of a Black teenager charged with the murder of a white sheriff’s deputy in rural Georgia, and the efforts of his mother, a prominent voting rights activist, to prove his innocence. According to Patterson, the novel was rejected by “roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers” thanks to a “new ideology of identity authorship”—“literary apartheid”—dictating that “white authors should not attempt to write from the perspective of nonwhite characters or about societal problems that affect minorities.”
To judge by the many irate comments this essay prompted, and the response to similar controversies in the past, this idea really ticks people off. Skeptics have been known to point out that Dickens didn’t have to be French to write A Tale of Two Cities, and to offer up such reductio ad absurdum scenarios as a world in which only farmers would be allowed to write novels about farmers, etc. Of course, no one is actually arguing that writers should depict only people of their own ethnicity. Most of the controversies over this issue have arisen in a case-by-case manner, with critics making specific claims about individual titles.
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The best-known individual title to fall prey to one of these controversies was Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel American Dirt. Around the time the book was published to great fanfare, Mexican American critics complained that Cummins had produced a version of the migrant experience that rang false; that Cummins’ publisher, Flatiron Books, had attempted to pass her off as having a stronger personal and ethnic connection to that experience than she actually has; and that the marketing of the book was tasteless. There was a subtler issue of the story’s framing as well. Aspects of Cummins’ novel seem engineered to make the protagonist easy to identify with for the middle-class women who buy most of the hardcover fiction in the U.S.; the main character is a bookstore owner fleeing Mexico City to the States with her small son after a drug cartel retaliates against her journalist husband by massacring the rest of their family. Fast-paced and dramatic, the novel has many of the essential qualities of commercial fiction, but Flatiron got carried away and attempted to position it as, in the words of publisher Bob Miller, “a novel that defined the migrant experience.” Had Flatiron just published it as your basic romantic thriller, American Dirt might have been able to fly to the bestseller lists under the radar of highbrow literary observers. But these grander claims attracted critics who objected to its pretensions to authenticity.
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It’s worth pointing out that although media workers consider the American Dirt affair a spectacular blowup, I’ve yet to meet anyone outside the industry who’s even heard about the controversy, and that includes many enthusiastic readers of the novel, which did in fact become a smash hit, selling more than 3 million copies worldwide. Arguably, the number of potential book buyers who care about whether the ethnicity of an author matches the ethnicity of their characters is vanishingly small. Even if Trial stirred up a fuss on Twitter, it’s unlikely anyone in the market for a Richard North Patterson thriller would notice it, let alone find it a reason to pass up the book. But the people who work in book publishing are part of the media, and many, including Patterson, believe that what happened to American Dirt and a handful of other books has publishers spooked.
Since his previous novel, Eden in Winter, was published in 2014, Patterson has concentrated on writing columns and essays on politics and social issues. But even back in his bestselling heyday, his novels were known for their attention to such issues as gun control, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and human rights in Africa. Patterson prides himself on the thoroughness with which he researches these topics, and long before sensitivity readers became de rigueur, he was passing his manuscript for 2013’s Loss of Innocence to such famous feminists as Gloria Steinem and Carol Gilligan, to make sure he’d properly handled such matters as abortion and rape. So what was it exactly that scared the big publishers away from Patterson’s new novel? The author found a smaller publisher happy to bring Trial to press, so it’s now possible to read it and consider this question.
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Trial begins with 18-year-old Malcolm Hill being pulled over at night by a leeringly racist deputy who makes it clear he’s about to abuse the kid or worse. Malcolm has been carrying a gun in his car because of the threats he and his mother, Allie, have received for their voter registration work. The two struggle over the gun, the deputy is killed, and Malcolm is arrested. Allie calls her college sweetheart, a Kennedyesque congressman named Chase Bancroft Brevard, to come help. Given that there’s no father in the picture for Malcolm, it’s crystal clear to the reader why she wants Chase involved, despite having walked out on him after graduation while concealing a big secret. Trial slowly builds to the event in its title, a process interrupted by a long flashback to Chase and Allie’s Harvard years.
The cover of Trial.
Trial
By Richard North Patterson. Post Hill Press.
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This novel is just as intensively researched as Patterson’s previous books, and, boy, do you see that research on every page. Patterson, by his own account, interviewed “over 50 people, including many Black Georgians immersed in the problems of race: voting-rights activists, politically engaged ministers, community leaders, civil-rights and defense attorneys, politicians, law enforcement officers and ordinary citizens.” I would not be surprised if many of them are directly quoted in the book’s dialogue. And ideologically, there’s not much here that Twitter could fault Patterson for. Trial mostly consists of Black characters lecturing the appropriately humble and attentive Chase on everything from insurance redlining and tokenism to voter suppression and the agonies that Black mothers feel about the safety of their sons. Their statements, and the novel’s manifest endorsement of them, are exactly on point according to current liberal/left thinking on these issues. Chase, a former prosecutor, joins as co-counsel, but the lion’s share of glory goes to the Black attorney Allie brings in to defend Malcolm, so Patterson steers clear of the dreaded accusation that he’s crafted a white savior narrative. If you believe that the role of a novel is to comprehensively instruct its readers on the correct moral position to adopt on political, social, and identity issues—and a lot of people do seem to take this view—then Trial is a nonpareil specimen of the novelist’s art.
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Does this make Trial “authentic”? I’m not in a position to verify how accurately Patterson depicts Malcolm as he drives down a dark Georgia back road, with Killer Mike “rapping on his sound system, rapping an anthem to resisting the police.” But the novel’s Black characters do feel one-dimensional to me, noble sufferers and crusaders whose only flaws are the flashes of impatience they feel at the stubborn injustice of their lot—if that can even be called a flaw. Here’s the rub, though: Patterson’s white characters also strike me as flat. All of Patterson’s characters are flat. Unlike real people, they all say exactly what they think, feel, and mean in fully formed paragraphs. This comes with the territory in many popular thrillers, in which everyone is broken down into camps representing either Good or Evil, and characters possess, at most, one or two personality traits that fix them as specific types.
Why Did 19 NY Publishers Put Richard North Patterson’s Book on Trial?
Contributor: Rick Pullen
Rick Pullen
June 7, 2023
12 min read
If bestselling author Richard North Patterson can’t get his fast-paced legal thriller focusing on American racism published in New York, then who can?
Patterson, who has written 22 novels, been on the NYT bestseller list 16 times and sold more than 25 million books, should have his pick among publishers. Instead, he couldn’t find anyone in Manhattan to handle his gripping new suspense novel Trial. Just about everyone agreed it’s a very good novel, but they fear the American Dirt syndrome, and he says they quietly told him white authors can’t write about the Black experience of racism in America.
At a time when writers are being threatened by calls for book banning all across America based on race and sex, 19 New York publishers did just that, Patterson says.
“My agents warned me that I was asking for trouble with major publishers, and I was acutely aware of the risk — most famously exemplified in 2020, when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of American Dirt, was widely castigated for the way she depicted a Mexican mother and son struggling to cross the U.S. border. As the British novelist Zadie Smith observed in 2019, ‘The old — and never especially helpful — adage ‘write what you know’ has morphed into something more like a threat: ‘Stay in your lane,’” he wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal, which has received much attention.
“To license the imagination across racial lines,” he says, “is not the enemy of diversity of authorship. Rather, we should directly confront the woeful lack of diversity in publishing houses and, even today, among authors.”
That said, Patterson’s account of racism, Black voter suppression, and an inter-racial love affair in America set in 2022 will start showing up on bookshelves June 13—but from an unexpected source. Ironically, a small conservative and Christian publisher, Post Hill Press, has taken up the cause. When New York publishers shied away from this novel, Post Hill Press Executive Editor Adam Bellow didn’t hesitate. A 30-year veteran of New York publishing and son of acclaimed bestselling novelist Saul Bellow, Adam saw a huge business opportunity. Trial has bestseller written all over it.
“It’s astonishing to me that a book by a prominent liberal author on a political topic of pressing interest to liberals can only be published by a conservative,” Bellow says. “…I’m a well-known conservative who disagrees with Ric on issues like voter suppression, but it turns out I’m a lot more of a liberal than the mainstream publishers who passed on his book.”
Post Hill Press is headquartered on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, in Brentwood, certainly no backwater, but it’s not exactly the center of the publishing world nestled among the country music stars.
“Not once did anyone suggest that any aspect of the manuscript was racially insensitive or obtuse,” Patterson wrote in his Journal piece. “Rather, the seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters.”
Refusal to publish his novel was so efficient, Patterson notes, it took only four months for all 19 of his New York rejections to fall into line like cascading dominoes. And just who shied away? “Pretty much anybody you can think of, including Hatchette imprints (which published his last novel nine years ago) …It basically breaks publishing into ethnic neighborhoods … Most of the people who said you can’t write this are white people who live in Manhattan.”
“For these publishers to imagine themselves the literary benefactors of Black America bespeaks of self-flattering and lamentably unexamined condescension,” Patterson told the website Bulwark, which he writes for on occasion.
What they are doing, he says, is committing literary apartheid — the cousin of book banning. “It’s kind of a misplaced notion of affirmative action.”
“A number of them found it (Trial) impressive; several opined that it evoked my best work. Nonetheless, my ethnicity was now deeply problematic,” Patterson said in the Journal.
Why is the publishing industry so afraid to take this on?
“It’s two things,” Patterson says. “It’s fear of self-righteous young people and fear of Twitter mobs.”
“The upshot,” Bellow says, “is the young people are in charge. What it means is writers are going to have to conform to the new standard. It will be fine if they are not white men … There’s a level of organized, idealizing activism within these publishing companies. At the managerial level, there’s a kind of cowardly abandonment of leadership and authority. The leadership when I was coming up would never allow the young people to determine which books were being published.”
Which is exactly what one publisher told Patterson. He said he liked the novel but would have to check first with his younger staff.
“This person knew perfectly well what the young people would say,” Bellow says. “They said, ‘no, it’s not allowed.’ It’s called cultural appropriation … It’s young people in their 20s — marketing associates, junior this and junior that.”
Patterson, who is a lawyer, says he has no desire to take on the role of aggrieved white man. Rather, he believes the publishing industry is woefully lacking in diversity. “But to repress books based principally on authorial identity is inimical to the language of creativity, not to mention to the spirit of a pluralist democracy.”
And what does this mean for other thriller, mystery, and suspense writers — those who have never visited the bestseller list or are struggling to get their first novel published? There are a lot of writers who are stretching the limits and taking chances right now who don’t fit the current trend in publishing, Bellows says. Now they are openly being discouraged from even trying. Patterson fears many may never get their writing careers off the ground.
“It’s not just affecting Ric,” Bellow says. “It’s affecting many people. It’s a trend that’s been going on over a long time. We’ve got writers coming to us (small press) from all perspectives … I see this as a very serious situation. It’s not a joke. As an independent publisher, however, it’s benefiting me.”
“Last year there was little resistance from writers themselves,” he says. “We have to see writers stand up and say ‘no.’”
Patterson, who describes himself as a liberal, has nothing but praise for his conservative publisher. “I give them credit for participating in something that is a matter of principal … They are due credit. I think the real embarrassment belongs to mainstream publishing. I just don’t mean me. This idea of creative segregation is … bad for everyone.”
Bellow notes he and Patterson are miles apart on ideology. “I don’t agree with him, but that’s the point of being a publisher. You don’t have to agree with every book you publish. It’s not my point of view, but that doesn’t matter.”
If this were 1960, Patterson’s novel might have been called To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s been compared to Harper Lee’s classic. But this is 2023 and he has updated the story of racial prejudice focusing on how much has not changed in America since Lee’s breakout novel 63 years ago.
This tale of America’s original sin is played out through the entitled passion of a very rich and idealistic Massachusetts congressman who comes to understand even his privilege makes little difference when it comes to race. Patterson’s story shows us we are still fighting the same issues — many nuanced and layered by the decades — but still barely coagulating at the surface.
The story begins with the lust of the oh-so-very Boston-bred and white-privilege-sounding Chase Bancroft Brevard, an obvious choice for Harvard inbreeding. By contrast, Allie Hill is a young Black woman who found her place in the middle class because her family runs a Black funeral home in rural Georgia.
Approaching graduation at Harvard, Allie and Chase fall in love and struggle with the social differences between their upbringings. Their relationship grapples with not just two cultures colliding, but two entirely separate worlds. Patterson’s sensitive description of their relationship runs deep, and it alone is worth this thriller’s price of admission.
He explores class and race honestly. It’s disturbing to read and still we’re eager to know if two young college students can find common ground beyond the bedroom. When Allie abruptly leaves without a word at graduation time, they both return to their roots and ambitions — he to Boston and she to rural Georgia. He becomes a progressive lawyer and later the same breed of congressman. (What else is there in Massachusetts?) She takes up the cudgel of a Black voter registration organization to stop Georgia’s voter suppression efforts and becomes the state’s premier voting rights advocate.
They lose track of each other until one morning when Chase, a rising star in the Democratic Party, sees the woman who broke his heart on a cable news channel. He is shocked to learn she’s a single mother, and her only son has just been arrested and accused of murdering a white sheriff’s deputy. Chase quickly does the math and realizes the young high school senior is his.
Then the real trial begins as Patterson explores the relationships between a black woman and a white man — and their biracial son as they become a media sensation. Chase risks his political career going to Georgia to help his son only to realize how difficult that is — not only as a legal matter, but to be accepted as a father who’s missed out on his son’s entire existence.
Only then does the circus begin.
Their son’s murder trial attracts knuckle-dragging white supremacists protesting outside the courthouse. Patterson’s description is blunt and walks up to the edge of cartoonish. And yet, his writing captures that very truth, that white supremacists are cartoonish. Their exaggerated and incendiary spewing of intolerance, superiority and hate is comical but never benign.
“Too many white people are all tangled up about race — they’re angry about feeling subliminal guilt without knowing enough about our history to understand why,” says protagonist Chase. “Instead, they feel resentful and, in an odd way, victimized. A classic case of projection.”
The underlying subtlety of today’s racism versus the sensational chanting of white supremacists displays the racial flashpoint in Patterson’s story. It’s easier for the frothing news media at the trial to tell the story of hate-spewing racists with guns and camouflage, than it is to assimilate the vital nuances of America’s racial divide into a cohesive relatable story. Journalism has its limits, but Patterson’s fiction does not.
Perhaps the novel’s most important element is Patterson’s examination of the turmoil of falling in love with someone of a different race in a country where many still refused to accept those relationships and are fearful to acknowledge we are not all of one genre. His writing is precise as he examines in detail their feelings for each other. Rarely, do you find a suspense thriller with this degree of literary depth.
He then steps beyond their relationship and examines today’s Black and white environment — two separate American cultures that do not live in harmony but side-by-side like two roommates who tolerate each other because neither can afford the apartment without the other. Patterson captures it in its full ugliness while never slowing the pace of his engrossing story.
How did he manage this? He spent a lot of time researching his topic. Patterson hasn’t written a novel for nearly a decade because he spent that time writing political commentary for HuffPost, The Bulwark and The Boston Globe. He realized much of his writings dealt with race, so he decided to use the creative reserves of fiction to delve more intensely into racism and capture its intrinsic truths.
“To depict my fictional Cade County, I spent an extended period in Sumter County, Georgia, a jurisdiction with a complicated past and present marked by often bitter political and social divisions,” Patterson says. Sumter is near Americus, Georgia, near former President Jimmy Carter’s home. There, Patterson interviewed grassroots voting rights activists, community leaders, ministers, civil rights lawyers, Black and white politicians, judges, the first Black sheriff, and a woman who, in 1960 at age 11, was imprisoned with other adolescent girls who tried to integrate a movie theater — an event known as the Leesburg Incident. Patterson includes it in his stunning narrative.
While in Sumter County he toured both Black and white cemeteries. The white cemetery was well-groomed and filled with Confederate statues. The Black cemetery was not nearly as pristine. Patterson noticed rows of infant graves there and was told infant mortality in rural Georgia is much higher among Blacks than whites — the result of their lack of access to good healthcare.
“You just see it all. It’s just not subtle,” he says.
To portray Allie Hill accurately, Patterson interviewed Nse Ufot, successor to Stacey Abrams as the head of the state’s seminal voting rights organization, the New Georgia Project, and three Black women who attended Harvard in 2003.
“This is a portrait of the America I know,” says Bruce Gordon, former CEO of the NAACP. “It is compelling, contemporary, and thoughtfully researched truth-telling. Trial might be fictional, but it is real.”
As real as Patterson’s fight to get his novel published.
Patterson, Richard North TRIAL Post Hill Press (Fiction None) $30.00 6, 13 ISBN: 9781637588062
A Black teen stands accused of murdering a cop. Can his White father save him?
For his first novel in nearly a decade, popular thriller author Patterson heads to rural Georgia, where 18-year-old Malcolm Hill accidentally kills a racist White police officer during a scuffle following a traffic stop. Malcolm was targeted by the officer (and kept a gun in the car) because his mother, Allie Hill, is a prominent Black voting rights activist and magnet for death threats. But because Malcolm was intoxicated and the officer left his dash- and bodycams off, Malcolm lacks exonerating evidence; worse, when prosecutors learn his Facebook feed includes a rapper's video advocating that Black people kill police officers, it's easier to argue for premeditated murder. Enter Chase Bancroft Brevard, a U.S. congressman, one-time Harvard classmate and boyfriend of Allie's, and--he's compelled to reveal before the trial--Malcolm's dad. Patterson is a pro at the courtroom procedural, well versed in legal and rhetorical parrying. But this narrative is labored and lapses into biased tropes. As an author's note explains, Patterson consulted with a platoon of experts on race and voting rights, but his Black characters' inability to talk about practically anything else makes them stiff and simplistic. And though Patterson has tried to avoid making a White savior out of Chase--Black lawyer Jabari Ford leads Malcolm's defense--Patterson spends a disproportionate amount of time dwelling on Chase's anxieties as a politician and father compared to Allie's and Malcolm's more pressing crises and Jabari's battle against a biased justice system. (In a Wall Street Journal essay, Patterson claimed the book was rejected by multiple publishers because he tried to get into Black characters' heads, but it's a flaw that he doesn't in Jabari's case.) Patterson's grasp of 2020s racial politics is solid enough, but he's failed to construct persuasive characters around them.
A would-be timely page-turner, weakly executed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
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"Patterson, Richard North: TRIAL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A752723067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f93d23b3. Accessed 22 July 2023.
Trial
Richard North Patterson. Post Hill, $30 (560p) ISBN 978-1-637588-06-2
Patterson (Eden in Winter) returns with an earnest if overwrought legal drama. Malcolm Hill--a young Black man whose mother, Allie, a Georgia voting rights advocate who will remind readers of Stacey Abrams and whose work has attracted death threats on the family--is driving after midnight, slightly drunk. A racist deputy, George Bullock, pulls him over on an isolated road. After Bullock spots a loaded gun on the front seat, he grabs it. A struggle ensues and Bullock is fatally shot. Malcolm is charged with Bullock's murder, and his prosecution becomes a national sensation and something of a political football involving incriminating text messages, revelations about Malcolm's parentage, and adversaries including a right-wing congresswoman. Though Patterson offers a clear-eyed view of the area where the Hills live, describing it as tainted by "decades of bad history... once acradle of slavery, so dangerous for Blacks," the mostly unsurprising plot drags on longer than necessary, and the clunky writing doesn't help. Only the author's most devoted fans need apply. (June)
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"Trial." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 14, 3 Apr. 2023, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A746558135/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49b3aafb. Accessed 22 July 2023.
‘Trial’: Richard North Patterson at his best
By Whit Griswold -June 28, 20230
Vineyarders browsing through Edgartown Books or the Bunch of Grapes this summer should beware of towering stacks of “Trial” (Post Hill Press), the 23rd novel by seasonal West Tisbury resident Richard North Patterson, which was published on June 13. Starting innocently enough with a college romance, albeit an interracial one, the tension in “Trial” builds steadily, a delight for readers who aren’t scared off by some raw truths about race relations in America today.
Thrown together months before they graduated from Harvard 20 years ago, Allie Hill and Chase Brevard couldn’t have come from more disparate backgrounds. He is from a life of privilege, and an almost preordained future: Of course he’d go on to law school, or business school, and devote his life to maintaining the establishment’s status quo. Her destination was more specific: She’d return to rural Georgia — a world so distant from his that it defied comparison — and devote her life to enfranchising poor Black Georgians. Problem was, they fell in love. Until she cut the affair short, inexplicably, when she left Cambridge only days before graduation. There was no communication between them thereafter.
Brevard eventually became a U.S. congressman, with a limitless political upside, while Hill founded Blue Georgia, a voter registration effort of underprivileged (read Black) Georgians that had attracted national attention. Neither married.
Watching MSNBC as he prepares breakfast one morning in his Georgetown home, Brevard is shaken by a bulletin announcing the arrest of Malcolm Hill, the 18-year-old son of the well-known Georgian activist Allie Hill. A quick calculation takes his breath away: Could this be his son? Would this explain Allie’s abrupt departure from Cambridge 19 years earlier? Malcolm is being held “pending investigation of the shooting death of a sheriff’s deputy in rural Georgia.” In the town of Freedom, Ga., no less.
Brevard decides immediately to head for Cade County, where Allie lives and works, and where Malcolm is incarcerated. For starters, he has to find out from Allie if Malcolm is indeed his son. If so, he wants to meet Malcolm and do everything in his power to support him. Brevard’s effort to rebuild a relationship with Allie, and build one from scratch with Malcolm, is particularly poignant.
Returning to Washington only for the most essential business on Capitol Hill, Brevard finds himself enmeshed in the legal effort to defend Malcolm against the capital murder charge. From the moment the gun discharged the bullet that blew away half the deputy’s forehead, Malcolm maintained that it was an accident. He was also convinced that the deputy had targeted him ahead of their confrontation, and violated several police department rules of conduct during it, never mind baiting him with vile descriptions of his mother, Allie.
While it is clear to Malcolm’s lawyer, Jabari Ford, that the deputy was not only a dedicated racist but also a borderline nutcase who believed the 2020 presidential race had been stolen, he was still the law. Even the possibility that a black teenager had killed him intentionally makes many local residents see red. White nationalists, many of them heavily armed, protest outside the courthouse whenever court is in session. Both Allie and Chase are targets of late-night harassment, via bullet.
It’s not surprising that Patterson’s description of the trial is both nuanced and compelling, given his many years of experience as a trial lawyer. Nor is his handling of the many delicate human interactions in the book, considering this is his 23rd novel, many of them bestsellers.
Patterson’s choice to set the events in the book so close to the present gives it an immediacy that is unsettling at times: The deputy was shot just last year? The trial was held this winter? Five months ago? It is also an effective way to remind us of racism’s pervasiveness and endurance. It’s been here for 400 years, it’s here now, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Cameo appearances by current players — Dorothy Turner Dark, for instance — in the noisy debate about the future of our country also make the book feel more urgent. This isn’t history; it’s happening right now, and we ignore it at our peril.
Before “Trial,” Patterson published 22 novels, the last one nine years ago. Since then he has focused on essays and columns, in which, he found, “issues relating to race, either directly or implicitly, informed” much of what he wrote: “Given that, I started thinking about using my background as a trial lawyer, political commentator, and author … to construct a narrative about characters caught in the convergence of several of our gravest issues: voter suppression, discriminatory law enforcement, the political exploitation of racial animus, the rise of white nationalism, and frequent failure of our legal system to provide fair trials in racially charged circumstances.”
At an age when most novelists no longer have the energy to tackle a complicated story that runs some 550 pages, Patterson’s decision to take on a project of this scope and complexity is noteworthy. It’s a sign of the times: To many of us, the divide in this country is beyond worrisome, and we feel helpless as it swirls around us. Patterson’s response was to tackle it head-on in the genre he knows best, fiction. Still, the perils are plentiful when a novelist builds a book around a topic, in this case, obviously, racism, and if they do so at the expense of a story that can draw in and hold the reader, they’re in trouble. It’s to Patterson’s immense credit that he decided to skate out on this thin ice, consequences be damned.
Richard North Patterson will be appearing at the Martha’s Vineyard book festival and Islanders Write.