Book Review: A Moment in the Sun

by Marx Dorrity, June 28, 2011

A Moment in the Sun
John Sayles
McSweeney’s, 2011, $29

Dimly remembered now, the Spanish-American War—precipitated by the unexplained sinking of the USS Maine in the Havana harbor in 1898—was our nation’s first go at exporting democracy (i.e. to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam). It announced the role we continue to play to this day, that of a proactive, global force, while demonstrating our facility for cloaking imperialist tendencies in the rhetoric of liberation.

In John Sayles’s new historical novel, A Moment in the Sun, a gun-slinging brothel boss rallies an outfit of luckless Alaskan prospectors with the absurd-sounding declamation, “Shall we free the oppressed Cuban from the saffron banner of Spain?” One volunteer, Hod, feels this is “something big, something real, something important in the world and that he is part of it.” Predictably disillusioned, Hod soon realizes that “men like him, homeless, desperate men, are blown about the world like cinders from a locomotive stack, and the Army is as good a place for them to end up as any.”

Known primarily as a filmmaker whose distinguished body of work includes The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, and Lone Star, Sayles is a storyteller intent on validating the experiences of the disenfranchised, portraying injustice, and elucidating paradoxes that belie the social order. His hefty war novel, which ranges across multiple fronts and cultures, ranks with the best—and avoids the didacticism that occasionally hinders his films. His representations of torture and oppression are visceral and all the more affecting for the lack of rumination. Labor and relations among workers, whether in a lead mine or a toy factory, are weightily detailed and suffused in gloom. When the author drifts into the backstory of a hospital worker, the daughter of a Chinese tenant farmer sold as a child to a Hong Kong pimp, so perfectly does he convey the mood that the reader can almost hear a bamboo flute mournfully accompanying the segues. With period touches such as an opium-addicted paperboy in lower Manhattan, sexual jokes in a minstrel show, or the public electrocution of an elephant, time and place feel at once foreign and altogether plausible. There are inspired flourishes in his use of slang: The men in the prison where President McKinley’s assassin is held are “swindlers and pete-men, gashouse pugs and forgers, sneaks and stalls, smash and grab artists, pennyweights, till-tappers, boardinghouse thieves and moll-buzzers.”

The novel centers on the 25th Infantry, an actual segregated regiment of “buffalo soldiers” deployed because it was believed that people of color were immune to tropical diseases. It chronicles three men from Wilmington, North Carolina: Junior, the son of a McGill-educated physician who writes his father thoughtful accounts of military life and race relations in stunning prose; Royal, who holds a vague hope that a tour of duty will give him a foot up in the post-bellum south; and Coop, a craps-shooting brawler who knows the battlefield is as close to equal opportunity as he will ever get. 
While the men are off doing Uncle Sam’s bidding, white supremacists stage a coup in their hometown, killing many and forcing black political and community leaders to flee. The Wilmington Massacre really did happen. The arrival of Jim Crow while the men are abroad half expecting to be honored for heroism (and simultaneously coming to comprehend that they are merely tools in a racist-colonialist plot) is the book’s central irony. As a novelist in full stride, Sayles makes us realize that the truth is simply unacceptable.