The Boy Orator

A tapestry-novel, BOY ORATOR covers the walls of your mind's eye with a multi-decade, 360-degree portrait of a rarely presented corner of American history, more powerful still in presenting a coming-of-age as well. Daugherty gives us the dirt-farming and coal-scavenging poor of Oklahoma during the first quarter of the last century, and dramatizes the brief but fierce conflagration of what was often such people's only hope for better -- the American Socialist movement. Yet he views this history through the eyes of someone who sees the past far less than he does the present and future, namely, the eponymous public speaker of the title, Harry Shaughnessy. At once charismatic and shy, Shaughnessy's a marvelously complex creation. Onstage, he commands the crowd and outshines, out-talks all challengers; off the boards, he stumbles as clumsily as the rest of us, overwhelmed now by ill-understood romantic feelings, now by the discovery of evil. Some of the scenes -- in particular that of the coal miners' camp -- bruise us with the same the quiet pummeling as we get from a great Walker Evans Depression shot. Harry and his Socialist brothers and sisters endure a tragedy, eventually. America veers into World War I and, in a classic pattern, its rank and file begin to punish anyone suspected of less than perfect patriotism. But this same crucible makes something more durable, more humane of young Harry. In the negelcted weeds of back-country Oklahoma, the destruction of one lovely bloom has allowed a tough new piece of greenery to flourish.