NOVEMBER ROAD

Listen to the Interview via Talkshoe

award-winning author Lou Berney’s NOVEMBER ROAD (on sale 10/9). This remarkable novel defies categorization – it’s a thriller, it’s historical fiction, it’s a love story—above all it’s an amazing piece of storytelling. I wanted to highlight some topics that I thought would be great for an interview with Lou Berney’s NOVEMBER ROAD (on sale 10/9):

• JFK’s Brain is Missing: While a lot of the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are pretty wild, the facts are just as incredible. For example, JFK’s brain, which might have answered once and for all from which direction the fatal shot was fired, vanished from the National Archives in 1966. It has never been found.

• In NOVEMBER ROAD, New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello orchestrates the Kennedy assassination. Several different conspiracy theories are intriguing, but Berney thinks the Marcello theory is the most plausible. Marcello, the most powerful and dangerous mob boss in America at the time, stayed out of the headlines, kept a low profile, and – unlike contemporaries such as Sam Giancana – lived to a ripe old age before he died of natural causes. A sign in his office said: Three can keep a secret if two are dead.

A time of turmoil and uncertainty: 2018 or 1963?

• In 1963 profound change was beginning to ripple across the country: Civil Rights, women’s rights, international relations and the threat of nuclear war. The Kennedy assassination crystallized for Americans the sense that they faced the unnerving prospect of an unknowable future.

• The assassination of the President, and her own reaction to it, motivates Charlotte to leave her husband and head to California. As a woman in 1963, she faced obstacles that women had traditionally faced, but also recognized an opportunity to change her life. Author Lou Berney’s mother found herself in a similar situation at the time, before he was born. He always wondered “what if” she had chosen a different path.

• America in post-war ‘50s and early ‘60s has often been depicted as idyllic, peaceful, and prosperous. This was not necessarily the case for significant segments of the population. Theodore, the young African-American man hired by the hitman to drive him, represents how pervasive racial inequality was at the time, and how members of marginalized communities lived under very difficult rules, with very different prospects.

• Frank Guidry grows up very poor in rural Louisiana, and like Theodore he’s swept up into a life of crime because he has few good options. Widespread poverty in the 1950s and 1960s was one of America’s dirty secrets, one that was largely ignored by mainstream popular culture.

NOVEMBER ROAD has been called “an American classic” and “a deeply American novel.” What about this novel makes is so American?

• The story of America is about changing WHERE you are in order to change WHO you are. The Puritans crossed the ocean. The pioneers headed west. NOVEMBER ROAD is a classic American road trip. The characters have to leave behind their pasts and hit the road in order to find a new future.

• The journey to a new land, in the American story, has always been filled with not only promise but also real danger. That’s something Berney tried to represent in NOVEMBER ROAD. Opportunity has a price and success (or even survival) is not a foregone conclusion.

The novel is set in an iconic period and the theme of change is throughout the novel. But how everything changed, not just the President, but how that one event changed a nation and ordinary people decided to take different roads. As you’ll see in this Publishers Weekly interview, change is a big theme in the novel. Can people really change? What inspires change? And what happens when change is thrust upon someone?

NOVEMBER ROAD received starred reviews from all four trade publishing publications, but Kirkus highlights an interesting theme of the novel:

WALL STREET JOURNAL profile of Lou Berney discussing NOVEMBER ROAD (October 8th)

ASSOCIATED PRESS profile of Lou Berney discussing NOVEMBER ROAD (October 8th)

OKLAHOMAN reviews NOVEMBER ROAD (October 7th): Oklahoma City’s much-decorated novelist Lou Berney isn’t resting on his laurels. His new suspense novel, “November Road,” shows him at the top of his game. It crackles with the fire — and ice — of Dante’s “Inferno.”

WASHINGTON POST reviews NOVEMBER ROAD (October 4th, in print 10/12): “[November Road is] one of the most distinctive, unexpected crime novels of recent years.”

“ ‘November Road’ could easily have descended into sentimental cliches, but — thanks largely to the character of Charlotte — it never does. Charlotte, who is based in part on Berney’s own mother, is an extraordinary woman just beginning to discover her own capabilities. Faced with a series of debilitating crises, she persists, moving steadily forward toward a larger, more meaningful life. The result is a quietly moving evocation of public and private trauma, of individuals searching for new lives in a radically altered world. This is Berney’s best book to date. It deserves the wide, appreciative readership it seems likely to find.”

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