The present action of Flournoy’s novel occurs in the summer of 2008, the housing and financial crises of the post–Bush recession in full swing. Less showy and more focused than that other big Detroit novel, 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Turner House cuts to the center of the fractured American dream, imparting a lyrical, memorable, history-in-brief of both the city itself and the larger cultural forces that built it and allowed it to crumble-all reflected through the broken hearts and households of one typical American family, the Turners. Maybe you could call it the Motown touch.Įarly reviewers projected The Turner House might well be the next Great American Novel-that elusive, often spurious honorific. But unlike Levine, Flournoy approaches her material through the wider lens of fiction, offering readers a harmonious and ultimately reassuring vision of home and familial love. Angela Flournoy’s debut novel The Turner House, one of the latest literary projects to engage with the history of Detroit and its people, evokes the power, honesty, and critical intelligence of Levine’s work (which forms a part of this book’s epigraph). Detroit served as inspiration for artists ranging from Diego Rivera, with his monumental ode to industrial labor in the murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, to Philip Levine, who captured, in poems like the iconic “They Feed They Lion,” the violent beauty and simmering tensions in the industrial scenes in which Rivera saw so much hope. The city of Detroit, from the rise and fall of the auto industry to the riots of 1967 and beyond, has popularly symbolized the twentieth-century American experience more dramatically than nearly any other city in the country. Review | The Turner House by Angela Flourney

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