The Great Mann
In October 1945, Charlie Trammell comes back to the US after harrowing years as a medic in WWII. Charlie, a 25-year-old Black man who from boyhood read classic authors and worked to enhance his vocabulary, narrates this novel. His beautiful storytelling comes out of a hard family background in brutally racist Virginia, and his own keen observations and deep thinking.
Charlie’s cousin, Margie, has invited him to her Sugar Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. Prominent Black entertainers, doctors, landowners live in Sugar Hill mansions. Relatively new to the neighborhood, James Mann owns one of the grandest estates and frequently hosts the most lavish parties. No one knows much about Mann or the source of his wealth. The characters and events parallel The Great Gatsby, set two decades before.
On the surface, Sugar Hill has the look and feel of a wealthy white community, and a few whites still live there. But, as Charlie tells us, “Everybody here is sleeping through the racism.” Racism lurks in many forms—police ignoring, even encouraging, violence on African Americans; the unchecked nastiness of white neighbors; a lawsuit and pending trial that could evict all Black people from their Sugar Hill homes.
Through Charlie’s telling, Lurie masterfully presents the emotions and lives of Black people “born into quicksand” and trying “to get out the best way they could” with their “choices determined more by… dark pigment than… bright intellect.” Lurie adds subplots of romance and friendship. Mann does all he can to find the girl he loved as a teenager. Margie’s marriage to an insurance executive is a rollercoaster. Charlie falls for a strong publicist. Page-turning storylines combine with strong characters struggling to find a decent life in an ugly time and place. Author Notes summarize the real anti-Black eviction case and Sugar Hill’s history. Highly recommended.
