SPEAK NOW! A Modern Novel

A modern novel? So modern that Mr. Yerby announces its revolutionary intent in a pretentious, portentous introduction beginning ""This is a novel about miscegenation -- one of the two or three ugliest and most insulting words in the English language......"" Without knowing what the other two or three are, they're probably here since this is tastelessly written with a garniture of unlikely French (the scene is Paris during the Student Revolt). The voice, hysterically high on the hog, is that of Harry, a jazzman in Paris hurt by the death of Fleur, whom he had loved, as well as manifesting the residual rancor of the black: ""No gawdamn burrheaded liverlipped son of his mother can crawl into the hay with thus purity of Southern white womanhood."" Well that's just what he does with Kathy, the daughter of a wealthy tobacco family; she's hurt too as well as pregnant and the rest of this deals with their mutually destructive scenes before and after marriage which finally they decide must succeed since there is so much to prove. All with shopsoiled political comments on Vietnam, the Jews, Mao, etc. etc. which Won't alter the fact that fictionally speaking it's just poor, white and black trash.