Rules of '48

"The Rules of '48", a novel by Jack Cady looks at change that takes place in the lives of two young men coming of age and those around them who raised, nurtured, influenced & scared them over a two month period that included 6 deaths in the summer of 1948. It takes place in post WWII Louisville as the nation tries to get back to normal but can't because normal isn't the norm anymore in the unsettling change that the war experience brings to race relationships. Here are quiet & noisy characters mourning the present and activating small but significant changes.

Fictionalized memoir and memoirized fiction have gotten deservedly bad press lately, so when the first line of Jack Cady's introduction to his posthumously-published RULES OF '48 states, This book began as a memoir, readers understandably might slam the cover shut and move to the next shelf. But that would be their misfortune. There's not a dishonest word in the novel, and if the author's mind was too perceptive and imaginative to settle for a straightforward recounting of history, that's our gain. RULES OF '48 is the knockout story of seven weeks during a hot summer in Louisville, three years post-World War II, when the past began to duke it out in earnest with the future. It's a tough book to pigeonhole. Crime novel? There are six deaths, four of anything but natural causes, and not peaceful. Sociological novel? Throughout the story, Blacks and Whites, Christians and Jews, struggle mightily to come to terms with the past and find their way into a puzzling and frightening, yet hopeful, future. Coming-of-age novel? Two teenaged boys, one White, one Black, cross the line into adulthood, one with relative ease, the other with great difficulty and pain. Ghost story? Yes and no. Jack Cady often relied upon ghosts as metaphors for history, and several ghosts walk the streets in this novel, uncomprehending representatives of a suddenly-incomprehensible past. Characters jump off the pages, their strengths and weaknesses constantly shifting as they try to keep their balance in a world changing with every move they make. Setting is movie-clear, in black, white, and sepiatone. I read the book in January, yet during one particular scene during the August dog days in Louisville, I realized I was sweating. Dialogue and the voice of the anonymous narrator are both right on; Cady had perfect pitch for the speech of blue-collar borderline-Southerners, including the wry, ironic humor of the region. This story of auctioneers Wade and Lester, Lucky the pawnbroker, teenagers Jim and Howard, the Samuels family, Bad Ozzie, and a steaming city-full of people in transition will leave you inspired and not a little saddened, but with the clear feeling that yep, stuff really did happen the way he said it did. I'd offer you some comparisons to other novels, but I can't. The author was an American original.