CNN - Review: 'On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon'

This book has a great opening scene, giving the impression that it will be filled with interesting twists and revelations. The scene is a crisis that deeply affects the narrator, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, enough for her to write about it decades later on the day she wishes to die. It's the turn of the century and Lowell is recalling her childhood on a tidewater plantation and her married life during the Civil War. Now she is ready to join her long-dead husband Quincy in eternity.

Emma wants to explain her life and how her family shaped her personality. Her greatest need is to examine her relationship with her father, and to show what the Civil War did to the South. It's a great premise and you want the entire story to grab you as does the opening scene. But it falls into predictability.

The book starts with a act of brutality performed by Samuel P. Tate, the owner of a vast plantation in Virginia. Even at the time, when Emma is a young child, she knows Tate, her father, is a brutal liar. But the character of Tate winds through the book until he becomes a stereotype.

All the characters are introduced with originality but each then falls into categories that have been written to death:

The father is an overbearing, brutal man who doesn't know how to show love;

Emma's mother is a long suffering, silent wife given to headache fits that leave her bedridden;

The faithful house servant Clarice, of course, is sassy and wise and the true guidance to Emma;

Samuel has a faithful man-servant whom he makes sit on the floor beside him;

Emma's older brother Whately is a sensitive boy who loves to read and of course won't get to run the plantation because Samuel thinks Whately is a failure. There are various others who fill predictable roles.

Emma bemoans her fathers coarseness and brutality and escapes her plantation by marrying (gasp) a Yankee from Boston. Quincy Lowell of course, is a loving, wealthy, protective husband to Emma. He is perfect, so the reader can see the difference between the two men in Emma's life. This literary board-over-the-head is as predictable as the rest of the book. Gibbons at last reveals the horror of Samuel Tate's childhood, the reason why he is brutal. But this really holds no drama since, by that point, you don't care what happens.

As the story winds through the years and the Civil War, Gibbons does succeed in describing the era with great detail. You get a clear picture of the time and events; you do see the horror of working in a wartime hospital; you can picture the furnishings of a plantation and the fine clothes that fill the trunks.

But the characters fail to hold interest as much as the description of the artwork on the walls.

In the end, the most interesting part of this books is the title, and that is not a good sign.

Ann Hastings taught history for three years before joining CNN NewsSource as an archivist.

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