Flight Risk takes off as a page-turning narrative with deep roots
and a wide wingspan. James Nolan, a fifth-generation New Orleans
native, offersup an intimate portrait both of his insular hometown
and his generation's counterculture. Flight runs as a theme
throughout the book, which begins with Nolan's escape from the
gothic mental hospital to which his parents committed the teenaged
poet during the tumult of 1968. This breakout is followed by the
self-styled revolutionary's hair-raising flight from a Guatemalan
jail, and years later, by the author's bolt from China, where he
ditched his teaching position and collectivist ideals. These
Houdini-like feats foreshadow a more recent one, how he dodged
biblical floods in a stolen school bus three days after Hurricane
Katrina hit New Orleans. Nolan traces these flight patterns to
those of his French ancestors who fled to New Orleans in the
mid-nineteenth century, established a tobacco business in the
French Quarter, and kept theold country alive in their Creole
demimonde. The writer describes the eccentric Seventh Ward
menagerie of the extended family in which he grew up, his early
flirtation with extremist politics, and a strong bond with his
freewheeling grandfather, a gentleman from the Gilded Age. Nolan's
quest for his own freedom takes him to the flower-powered,
gender-bending San Francisco of the sixties and seventies, as well
as to an expatriate life in Spain during the heady years of that
nation's transition to democracy. Like the prodigal son, he
eventually returns home to live in the French Quarter, around the
corner from where his grandmother grew up, only to struggle through
the aftermath of Katrina and the city's resurrection. Many of these
stories are entwined with the commentaries of a wry flaneur,
addressing such subjects as the nuances of race in New Orleans, the
Disneyfication of the French Quarter, the numbing anomie of digital
technology and globalization, the challenges of caring for aging
parents, Creole funeral traditions, how to make a soul-searing
gumbo, and what it really means to belong.
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