USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Gatsby’ reboot shines light on small- town life
Where factories close, only broken dreams remain
Her novel is being billed as The Great Gatsby, recast.
Yet Stephanie Powell Watts doesn’t need to stand on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shoulders. In No One Is Coming to Save Us ( Ecco, 371 pp., eeeg out of four), Watts cuts her own path and guides readers into the thick of a North Carolina town leveled by the shuttering of factories and littered with the halfdead dreams of its residents.
Watts invites readers into those dreams, moving among the main characters. Chief among them? Sylvia, the matriarch, who buries her anguish under the pretense of propriety and endures a husband who is too broken not to cut her; and her daughter, Ava, who has transcended the poverty passed down by her family but still carries a pang of sadness within her where she hopes would be a child.
Like her mother, Ava knows the slow burn of sharing a home with a husband who wanders, but she remains bound by oath, by hope, by love.
That is until her childhood best friend, JJ Ferguson, returns.
Our Gatsby stand- in — though no one would recognize the meek drifter as such — first entered Ava’s and Sylvia’s lives after he was sent to stay with a foster parent after his mother’s murder.
He and Ava bonded over that cup of suffering. And so, when JJ returns to the area 15 years later — newly moneyed and with a mansion so grand he can see out to his “green light” ( Ava’s roof ) — he looks to pour back love into his own “Daisy.”
The reality is that you can’t pour anything new into someone who is still bottling up the pain of the past.
No One Is Coming to Save Us follows the characters as they navigate that reality as well as the reality of class and race.
It should not go unsaid that the central characters are AfricanAmerican, a deliberate choice in a narrative that doesn’t so much adapt as wink at a classic that kept those kinds of characters on the margins.
For the most part, they are still on the margins.
Yet No One Is Coming to Save Us pivots the default lens to spotlight their experience — the poverty surrounding them, the pain they harbor and the peace in letting that pain go.
In the hands of a less- competent author, this could have devolved into mere voyeurism into the traumas and triumphs of black people.
Instead, Watts, with her knowing touch and full- bodied prose, delivers a resonant meditation on life and the comfort both in dreaming and in moving forward.