Copperhead

Zentner (Touch) wades into thorny racial and class thickets in this steely and often gripping novel. The action unfolds over several days in the rural university town of Cortaca, N.Y., a thinly veiled Ithaca. Jessup is a high school senior who “will always have been born into the wrong family,” blue-collar congregants of the Blessed Church of White America. He stopped attending the white nationalist church after his half-brother and stepfather were convicted in the beating death of two black college students four years earlier. Jessup excels at athletics and academics, and is dating the daughter of his black football coach, when his stepfather’s release stirs up old memories in Cortaca, where “history is everything.” A racially-tinged accident involving a boy from a neighboring town forces Jessup, aware of how bad it will look given his family history, to return to the Church, and its 20-year-old media-savvy spokesman, for help. The short chapters, most no longer than three pages, lend the narrative a propulsive, if occasionally choppy, feel. There’s a tendency to hammer home themes such as the indelible markings of family and class, and in the book’s last third, the taut drama morphs briefly into a conspiratorial thriller that strains credulity. Nonetheless, Zentner’s portrait of a young man’s conflicting desires for disavowal and belonging is rich and nuanced. (July)