Brown was among a cadre of Black writers in the 1970s doing in print what Richard Pryor was doing on stage.
First published in 1978, this jazz-inflected novel reappears decades later as a prescient ancestor to today’s insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction.
Brown’s first and most celebrated novel comes across as a kind of compacted day-in-the-life spin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, only with one point of view at its center. It belongs to Melvin Ellington, who as the novel begins has just been paroled from prison, where he spent two years after refusing military induction to protest the Vietnam War. As he heads back to his family’s home in Queens, Melvin begins flashing back to various points in life, beginning with his days and weeks in stir, keeping at bay all manner of threats and assaults, especially from the rapacious con Chilly, while keeping his nose clean long enough to get out. Once back in his old neighborhood, Melvin’s reveries wander afield, as far back as school days with his childhood buddies, the swaggering Otis, demure Alice, and brash Pauline, and the collegiate years when he was swept up in political activism with its rallies, demonstrations, interracial parties called “freedom highs,” and even an act of “revolutionary suicide” by one of the activists. Things are no less volatile in Melvin’s post-parole life as he reunites with Otis, who, unlike Melvin, went into the Army and lost his right hand in Vietnam. The long day’s journey ends with Melvin, Otis, Alice, and Pauline party-hopping throughout New York and Otis’ bitterness at Melvin and life in general slow-boiling toward a violent climax. Brown’s coming-of-age novel, drawn from his own real-life experiences, explores a young Black man’s difficulties with negotiating his way to maturity during the tumultuous years of the civil rights era and its immediate aftermath. But the novel gets its energy and, ultimately, its staying power less from its plot or theme than from its style: discursive, scatological, ribald, and acerbic. It deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges.
Brown was among a cadre of Black writers in the 1970s doing in print what Richard Pryor was doing on stage.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944211-98-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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