Rave4ColumnsThe vintage and revenge of memory, its random lurch and rough stroke: this is her great theme, Margo Jefferson ... She prizes apart autobiography, splits it totally open; lunges audaciously at the delusions of the American demesne; flails and impales shibboleths; and she records her findings ... The technique is that of estranging exposition followed upon by swift identification ... The arcade of memory is collapsed into one huge heap. Jefferson refuses chronology, neglects to date her reminiscences. The mode is memoir, but equally is it intellectual history ... Experience itself is her métier. Jefferson is all the time affected, always securing impressions ... Jefferson’s policy is one of radical imagination into and out of their predicaments, those beau ideals, their situations of alluring and historical specialty ... Jefferson’s policy is one of radical imagination into and out of their predicaments, those beau ideals, their situations of alluring and historical specialty ... She takes in whatsoever is propitious to subsume, only that, to the omission of all the insalubrious rest; she wants for herself Ideas, collects them, adjoining them to her person with omnivorous concern ... This is Constructing a Nervous System, or what we might finally come to call Margo Jefferson by Margo Jefferson.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PanBookforum... [a] plodding, ahistorical novel. Indeed, The Water Dancer’s version of slavery is dotted with minute factual deviations—a narcissism of small differences—that aim to situate the novel at a liberating remove from strict historical realism. But liberated into what? The condition of Hiram Walker, the protagonist and narrator, bears every conceivable resemblance to slavery—so why has Coates rechristened that paralyzing predicament as \'the Task\'? The designation reeks of euphemism, or of the corroding consolations of \'subversion,\' though a more charitable reader might mark it a productive semantic revisionism, enabling a new view of familiar tropes. No doubt Coates himself would. It’s hard to agree ... Scenes set [in the fictitious Virginia town of \'Lockless\'] are the novel’s best, its most historically engaged. Coates writes moments of unity among the Tasked with fervor and care, evoking the retained, imperishable traditions of life before enslavement ... Some few hundred pages of slack, distended subplot...elapse ... We recognize the petrified flexors of a historical muscle: narrative rigor mortis.
