PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s an awkward situation, to say the least, and to Webster’s credit, she leans into the awkwardness. Her excellent and thought-provoking book is on every level about unknowing rather than knowing ... The materials Webster has to work with, scant as they are, are potent and disturbing ... There’s another side to [Banneker\'s] personality, which Webster only hints at: the early life he led as part of a mixed-race, African English family, outside the strictures of Jeffersonian racial supremacy. I wanted her to keep pushing back into that world, into the sources of his creative, resistant spirit.
Marilynne Robinson
MixedThe Los Angeles TimesI’ve sometimes wondered whether Robinson originally intended to set her series in the 19th century — a time when emancipated people set up free communities, giving Iowa a substantial Black population. It’s always seemed to me that Robinson’s heart is there — in the era when the Great Awakening inspired a prophetic, utopian Christianity — rather than in the rigid 1950s, when these Black communities had disappeared and white rural churches promoted lock-step patriotism and anti-communism, not introspection and spiritual unease ... On this small scale, Jack is a tender, surprising, poignant, subtly funny story that would make a great arthouse adaptation, directed by Barry Jenkins and scored by Tom Waits. It doesn’t matter, from this perspective, that the novel hardly seems to take place in a city at all, just as the previous books in the series hardly seem to inhabit a town ... the Gilead novels are supposed to inhabit a concrete historical moment. No trace of the civil rights movement exists in Jack. No news of any kind enters the novel, in which Black people and the Black churches of St. Louis play a central role. Also no music, no radio or television, no movies — no textures or gestures of popular culture ... It’s true that when people are intensely in love, that rush of blood in the ears itself can drown out all other signals, which is why, to me, Jack is more compelling and recognizable than Robinson’s other Gilead novels. But it doesn’t change the fact that as a work of American literature, Jack is, like the other books in the series, an act of wishful or even magical thinking. It works as a story about individuals transcending their racialized world only by treating racism as a vague evil perpetuated offscreen, to be overcome by virtuous intentions. Anyone who’s witnessed the last four years of U.S. politics knows better than that. Marilynne Robinson is so committed to acting as a majority of one, in Thoreau’s phrase, that she’s willing to gloss over a century’s worth of inconvenient facts — from the racial history of Iowa to the doctrinal splits in Calvinist denominations that have produced today’s conservative extremists — in service to an idealized common Americanness that fades as soon as you try to bring it in focus.
Amy Waldman
MixedNew York MagazineAmy Waldman’s The Submission is a curious literary cryptogram, a novel that genuinely seems not to know how novel it wants to be. Not a nonfiction novel, not a documentary novel, neither a historical satire nor a memoir that flirts with fiction, it’s more like a simulation, a simulacrum, of our very recent history ... Written largely before last summer’s Park51 ground-zero-mosque fiasco but published a year later, it accomplishes the rare feat of being prescient after the fact, a counterfactual novel that turns out to be accurate in all the details that matter ... Waldman was a New York Times reporter who covered September 11 and its aftermath, in New York and South Asia, and her greatest asset here is her ability to walk through walls ... The Submission reads like a perfectly achieved magazine feature. That is, not defamiliarization but refamiliarization, i.e., kitsch, like visiting a wax museum and contemplating how much effort, how much human skill, went into making those uncanny replicas ... Of course, The Submission is not nonfiction, however much it mimics it; it’s a novel, and we have to ask, simply, Why? ... [The] inability to step outside its own pressure chamber explains why The Submission, while finely crafted and expertly designed, fails the test Ezra Pound proposed last century: that literature be news that stays news...Instead, it illustrates how easily we are seduced—in fiction or, more chillingly, in \'fact\'—by the familiar; how easy it is to mistake detail for depth and plausibility for insight.
Fred Moten
RaveBook ForumThe project of consent not to be a single being goes something like this: Take on all these institutions, but not in the order in which they usually present themselves; invent a new idea of order that is improvisational and fluid, that defies and even replaces the practice of systematic argument. Black and Blur is most explicitly focused on music, poetry, and visual art ... An engagement in experimental reading, where my own doubts about the possibility of the project only strengthen my sense of wanting to get back into it, to do the work.
Saidiya Hartman
PositiveBookforumIt’s impossible not to read this as a manifesto for a practice of writing that moves, consciously and intentionally, between observation and the imagination. The inner lives of the most resistant and unacceptable people—the ones we most want access to—are exactly the ones least likely to be captured in any detail in historical accounts. That’s the cramp in the creative act (because it is a creative act) of bringing these lives into focus... a collective portrait of women who could not be understood in the language of their own time. In this sense, Wayward Lives is a profound and painstaking act of reconstruction that renews our understanding of an era now largely faded from public memory ... more than anything else, is a meditation on what it meant to love and have sex freely when marriage for poor black couples was all but impossible, when migration for work could mean months or years of separation, and adequate health care and birth control were inaccessible ... I found it a little disconcerting to encounter Hartman insisting that readers could verify Wayward Lives through its sources, when at many other points in the text she expresses, so vividly, her need to say what the sources do not. This led me to wonder: Is the relationship between Wayward Lives and its archive so different from the relationship between Toni Morrison’s Beloved? ... What matters in all these texts is the imaginative hunger that prompts the writer to create new vocabularies for speaking about history. The archive is part of the process (and sometimes part of the text), but in the end, in the reader’s eye, it almost vanishes—it is, so to speak, overwritten.
Michael Ondaatje
RaveNew York MagazineIf this sounds like a recipe for picaresque adventures, a contemporary Huckleberry Finn or postcolonial Kim, it is, only sobered by a tinge of erotic longing and an adult’s feeling of foreboding for years of loneliness to come … The Cat’s Table is conscientious, character-driven, and psychologically acute—the kind of book once championed by E.?M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen and today practiced by writers like Claire Messud and Jhumpa Lahiri. It accepts, as all these writers do, the humanistic imperative to know one’s characters as well as possible, to make them both complex and transparent to the reader. In this sense, Ondaatje is not simply demonstrating ambivalence about his own artistic principles; he’s gone and undercut the far more radical and decidedly untransparent poetics of his earlier work.
John Edgar Wideman
MixedBookforumAs I read Writing to Save a Life, I felt jealous on behalf of the more capacious narrative that could have been, had Wideman sought to imagine more of Louis's experience ... Wideman's commitment is to imaginative, not legal, truth: to the realm in which, according to an Igbo proverb he often quotes, 'all stories are true.' In that sense, I came away wanting Wideman to create a more cohesive fiction—a coherent, consistent, fictional Louis Till—to work against the shapelessness of Till's historical presence. While understanding, at the same time, that Wideman wants me to walk away, as he walks away, still frustrated.
Bei Tong
RaveThe New York Times\"Perhaps the best-known work to arise from China’s gay, or \'comrade,\' literature movement in the 1990s, Beijing Comrades elicited enormous admiration — and outrage — when it was published online. It has never appeared in print in mainland China, and the author’s true identity has never been established ... [It] has lingered in the margins far too long. Scott E. Myers’s translation demonstrates that it’s one of the most significant Chinese novels of our time.\
