The Neighborhood We

For my seventy-fifth birthday, at the close of 2023, my good friend Debra Monroe gave me a copy of Scott Blackwood’s We agreed to meet just here, winner of the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel. I opened the first page, reached the last page in a matter of hours, turned back to page one, and read this little jewel of a novel a second time.

Surprise greets me in Blackwood’s introduction to the Deep Eddy neighborhood just north of the Colorado River in Austin, Texas. Pleasant surprise. The neighborhood introduces itself in first-person plural—the voices of a community speaking as one, as we, acquainting me with a cast of characters I want to know, immersing me in a community ethos:

   . . . we think of deer we sometimes still see along our greenbelt
  standing in groves of cedar, motionless, testing the air. . . . we 
  can feel the morning-dark quiet of our houses just before the
  children wake up, just before our hearts are gripped with doubt.

This is Blackwood’s opening chapter: five pages of a neighborhood speaking. Turn the page, and we’re in a traditional third-person narrative, with the focus on a single Deep Eddy resident. Three pages of this second chapter, and we’re back to the magical we, as the neighborhood muses about one resident:

  If you had lived long on our street, and drunk late at our parties,
  you would know that before retiring and moving to Texas, Odie
  Dodd had been a government physician in Georgetown, Guyana. 
  Squawking through the hole in his throat where his larynx had
  been before the cancer, Odie would have told how Jim Jones
  had asked him to the People’s Temple to vaccinate the children.

Odie is known to all in this neighborhood. Scott Blackwood summons them to move his story forward.

We agreed to meet just here doesn’t have a single protagonist. It has a plural, a choral character at center. As the novel develops, intermittently, these characters join to voice the story of their neighborhood.

In January of the current year, I read We agreed to meet just here for a third time. The narrative approach continues to intrigue me.

About the Author:

Scott Blackwood died on October 4, 2023, in Roanoke, Virginia, of complications from ALS. He was fifty-eight. Blackwood was the author of two novels, a short story collection, and two works of narrative nonfiction. His final novel See How Small was awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction.

We agreed to meet just here is not readily available, but used copies are out there. It is a deeply rewarding read—well worth searching for a used copy in good condition.