4/5 stars
What’s it about? Lucille Clifton sketches her family tree as she journeys with her family to her father’s home for his funeral. Each section is dedicated to one of Clifton’s ancestors, but others crowd in with their own tales and entanglements, mimicking the jockeying and overlappings within any family. Honest, powerful, and brimming with love and pride.
How’d I find it? I found this book by happenstance at Enoch Pratt Free Library and can never resist an NYRB title. This was gobbled up over beers while a football game held surrounding friends rapt.
Who will enjoy this book? At less than 90 pages, Generations is worth any reader’s attention. Folks who liked Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith, who opens Generations with a beautifully written introduction, will particularly appreciate this title.
What stood out? The structure of the book reinvents the memoir genre. Clifton curates an impactful collage of photos, dialogue, secondhand stories, memories, lines from Walt Whitman, and snippets of her journey to Buffalo. This is the experience of a funeral in real time, recreating the barrage of interconnectedness that loss unleashes, the lore we fall into when surrounded by the people who made us possible.
Which line made me feel something? “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. ‘We come out of it better than they did, Lue,’ my Daddy said, and I watch my six children and know we did.”