NO EASY PLACE TO BE

by Steven Corbin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1988

Spirited debut novel about the Harlem Renaissance--in the playful historical mode of E.L. Doctorow. With the booming Twenties as backdrop, Corbin aims for a black historical epic in this whirling, romanticized tale of three fictitious sisters attracted like moths to the personal, political, and literary flames of Harlem's grandest period. Velma, the protagonist, is a bright Barnard graduate swept into literary fame and sexual adventure when her first novel thrusts her into celebrity. Caught between contrary friends and lovers--one an effete black Harvard grad and novelist, the other a gay bohemian--she slowly comes of age as woman and writer. Her sisters represent contrasting dilemmas for black women of the period: Louise, a fair-skinned dancer, enters an explosive marriage with a wealthy Italian husband by secretly passing for white; Miriam, politically angry, sexually abused, falls into a lesbian encounter that symbolizes Harlem's brief affair with libertinism. Corbin manages this plotting symmetry with careful Élan and an eye for titillating historical detail. At her literary soirÉes, Velma rubs shoulders with the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, whose radical sexual and aesthetic ideals inspire her quest to ""live her life out loud."" The author is less good at giving the period and his characters real depth--Velma in particular slowly fades against her emerging male lovers--and his prose is occasionally cloying, mannered, and just plain clumsy. Still, overall, a Valiant stab at period re-creation, and an admirably sympathetic portrait of a time and place rarely visited by American novelists.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION