City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

I noticed this book reviewed on one of the book blogs I read and bumped it up in the queue since I had just read Eggers' Zeiton and wanted to compare the two stories about New Orleans. While Eggers' was non-fiction and this was a novel, I came out of the two books with reversed reactions - Eggers told a story while Piazza's best accomplishment with this book was a reasonably comprehensive view of New Orleans in the months after Katrina.

Surprisingly, reading this book felt much more like reading non-fiction. There were two families whose lives the book followed and certainly their stories were compelling, but it was the city of New Orleans itself that he seemed to take the most care in characterizing. The characters were reasonably predictable in their concerns and their conflicts, and he made some easy choices: for example, making one of the families affluent and white while the other was poor and black, and making one of the main characters a newspaper reporter. But I forgave Piazza his trite setup for his portrait of the pure devastation and ruin that New Orleans experienced.

During Hurricane Katrina, Web and I had been traveling in Argentina. Skillfully avoiding televisions and newspapers to fully immerse ourselves in the culture there, we had little idea what was going on at home until we got back about a week after the storm. It was hard to understand how bad things were, and completely surreal to believe it was going on in the United States. Even reading this book I had a hard time believing that our government really reacted this poorly, and I felt shame reading the descriptions of the city and how it was that so many people lost their lives.

When I chose to read the book I was hoping for more of a story with characters I cared about, but I value what I got out of the book - a sad education on the before and after of New Orleans, with a cautiously optimistic view of the rebuilding that continues today. Eggers says in his forward that he did not intend to provide a comprehensive survey of Katrina, but Piazza may have succeeded in doing this. Ironically, the line between non-fiction and fiction that has been subject to much discussion in literary circles lately (and that has historically been navigated carefully by Eggers) seems to have been toyed with by Piazza too - his characters are composites of so many of the both heartbreaking and uplifting stories that we've heard in the years since Katrina, the situations all potentially leads for stories in the New York Times or Newsweek.

I'm not sure that I would say I liked this book more or less than Zeiton - I liked both of them, and neither was what I expected. Together, they gave me a multi-dimensional view of an important chapter in our recent history.