Review: In his second novel, ex-Charlotte judge weaves a story of a second love affair
Former Charlotte judge Walter Bennett, who now lives in Chapel Hill, is making a name for himself with his second career.
His first novel, “Leaving Tuscaloosa,” won wide acclaim — including the Alabama Author’s Award and being named a finalist for both the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and the Crook’s Corner Book Prize for debut novels set in the American South.
So, gulp. How do you top that?
By striking out for new territory.
In Bennett’s latest, the gritty and engrossing “The Last First Kiss,” he leaves behind Tuscaloosa and its 1962 civil rights protesters and heads for North Carolina’s Outer Banks and a contemporary tale of love the second time around.
The novel grapples with these basic questions: Is the pull of a romantic past enough to propel an aging couple into an unknown future? And, how much of who we were as young people is still who we are as adults?
Ace Sinclair, widower, Vietnam vet, Red Sox fan, retired Raleigh trial lawyer, imbiber of single malt, has come to his live-oak-shrouded beach house, passed down to him through the generations, daydreaming about his high school sweetheart, J’nelle Reade, last seen at a high school reunion eight years earlier.
J’nelle, also widowed, high-powered career on the wane, estranged from her adopted daughter, was a “straight-A student whose face beamed from the choir stall…” But by her senior year, she smoked, drank beer and led the two of them into escapades Ace would never have dreamed up himself.
Their new relationship begins with e-mails, mostly condolences about her husband’s mysterious disappearance. The correspondence quickly morphs into joy for Ace whenever he sees a new message from J’nelle pop on his screen.
Too soon, his heart is back in high school. When Ace doesn’t hear from her, he imagines she’s fallen for someone else. Threading the doubts, more daydreams: “Those old memories of dances, kisses, shadowy parking lots, and unbuttoned blouses rose in his dreams like red-winged blackbirds whirring out of a seed-choked marsh – their bright red and yellow epaulets flashing against their own blackness and a wintery sky that seemed to be his life.”
He’s in over his head. He’ll put the brakes on. Slow it down. Exit.
Sure he will.
J’nelle accepts his invitation to visit him for the weekend at the old Outer Banks house. Who can turn back now?
Two warnings: Bennett’s characters are not young. Ace is 75. J’nelle, 76. Neither are they entirely well. Ace has been experiencing tremors in his hand, arms, legs. A battery of tests awaits. J’nelle faces tests for possible breast cancer.
And did I mention that Hurricane Freya is barreling toward the Outer Banks?
As for the weekend, J’nelle tells Ace she wants to “search for the truth. About us, about each other, about ourselves.” And she wants them to do it together.
Ace’s reaction? “He feels a reflexive instinct to duck, as if a spear has been hurled at him from his past.”
Not to worry. It’s other forces — not words — that will propel these two. Call it the unconscious. Call it the call of the wild. Call it the lure of sex. In a scene that cries out to be filmed, Ace and J’nelle — at J’nelle’s insistence — hurl themselves into a turbulent ocean in the dead of night.
The waves are wild, thrashing. The two are flung apart, Ace caught in a rip current, a cramp in his leg.
“He is in the air a split second, then flipped over and thinks, This is how I will die – not by drowning but by being beaten to death. He has an image of his limp and lifeless body, rolling in the surf, and down the beach, and then all thought is lost in a mad whirling and tumbling until he feels the first scrape of his naked butt against the bottom. Then another flip, and his face grinds into it as well.”
If that scene hasn’t made it clear that the author intends for the couple to win this man vs. nature battle at least for now, he has them make love on the beach afterward – naked, in the rain, their bodies gritty with sand.
Will the hurricane smack the Outer Banks? Will the old cedar shake house survive? Will Ace and J’nelle make a go of it?
All that’s really important to know in this wild and evocative second novel is that the human heart will prevail amid the most violent storms, and that the words we bandy about are no match for what we silently know deep in our bones.
Meet the author
Walter Bennett will sign copies of “The Last First Kiss” (214 pages, Lystra Books) at 7 p.m. on Oct. 14 at Park Road Books, Park Road Shopping Center in Charlotte.
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This story was originally published October 6, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Review: In his second novel, ex-Charlotte judge weaves a story of a second love affair."