The Golden Weather

Book excerpt: Louis D. Rubin's first novel paints in golden light the spring and summer of a boy's thirteenth year in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1936. Rubin catches not only the passage from childhood to adolescence - and its attendant woes and triumphs - but also the streets, sounds, sights, and people of his native city in an era now past but made luminous in the language of time revisited. During the long, hot summer of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, Omar Kohn experiences his first love, builds a boat, learns how not to write poetry, and begins to see the flaws in his boyhood heroes. Along his journey to summer's end we meet vivid characters: the Marvelous Ringgold, streetcar motorist extraordinaire; Omar's mischievous best friend, Billy Cartwright; the rabbi and Omar's fellow pupils at Sabbath School; the black maid and yardman, Viola and Dominique; Dr. Horatio Chisholm, poet and extoller of local glories and pieties; and aged ex-ferryboat captain Major William Izard Frampton, C.S.A., whose wartime exploits don't quite match up with documented history. There is also Helen, from Philadelphia, in whose company Omar learns to question various assumptions about his world.