THE CHERRY PIT

by Donald Harington ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 1965

Now it appears for quite a while that this one is going to make it, despite the fact that Donald Harington's 28-year-old hero-narrator, Clifford Willow Stone, is significantly indistinguishable from a score of other sad, verbal, scatological but well-intentioned young men who inhabit the modern novel. It appears that The Cherry Pit is going to turn out to be a real plum because its author knows how to enthrall. One soars with optimism as Clifford Willow Stone leaves his job as a researcher for a Boston antiquities foundation, sojourns South to his home town in Arkansas, and re-befriends Dall Hawkins, a childhood buddy of Clifford's who has since risen to the estimable rank of Sergeant on the Little Rock police force. Yes, Dall was involved in all the revolutionary events of 1957. Yes, he says ""nigger"" a lot. And he even has a vicious German shepherd trained to attack sit-ins. But that's where it ends. Dall remains quite important throughout, but his racism takes a back seat, while Harington panoplies his novel with a 27-year-old girl who wears nun's undies and writes sentences on her upper palate with her tongue, a Phi Beta Kapa Negro man who choses to sound like a field hand, his wife -- a college educated Negro woman and therefore perfect, a playwright who leaves a suicide note blaming Superman comic books, Billy James Hargis, sex manuals, and Taylor Caldwell. More's the pity because the singularity of theme and substance is lost after a very promising start. Harington is a prolix but powerful writer who manages to be quite funny when he's most bawdy. But his Clifford Willow Stone turns out to be just another Yale educated, motherless child, with an astounding vocabulary and a great many romantic notions about the Negro race.

Pub Date: June 23, 1965

ISBN: 1592641784

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1965

Categories: FICTION