Good
Fences
by
Erika Ellis
Robert Frost once explained how "good fences make good neighbors":
that sometimes the "friends" next door remained friendly so long as
you kept your distance from them, and a fence was just their way of
keeping things "friendly". Erika Ellis' excellent first book,
Good Fences, takes that metaphor and gives it a distinctly
African-American spin.
But Robert Frost may not have been the only past literary influence
on the author's tale of three decades in the lives of a young black
professional couple who parlay a dubious professional triumph in the
early 1970's into a life of quiet desperation in a wealthy, all-white suburb.
All through Good Fences, there are situations and observations that
seem have been influenced by James Baldwin's non-fiction classic, The
Fire Next Time. Fire took the form of a long letter from
Baldwin to his son, but in reality The Fire Next Time was the
author's assessment about the state of the Civil Rights struggle in
the mid-1960's, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Watts Riots,
the protest marches in Selma, Alabama, the assassination of Malcolm X,
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 all followed closely on each other's
heels.
While all this may sound like heavy going, Good Fences is in fact
more satirical than deathly serious. The stories of Tom and Mabel
Spader from their childhoods in an all-black rural town to lily-white
Connecticut suburbs are straight-forward and well done, but once in
Greenwich the growing insanity of their life in the mainstream of the
American Dream mixes as wit with wisdom. A recurring theme is the
subtle extremes to which the Spader's are driven not from the lack
of acceptance from their white neighbors, but rather the black couple's
desperate efforts to avoid jeopardizing that acceptance. Thus, when they
decide to hire a domestic to help Mabel around the house, the Spaders
choose a black woman: not because they are afraid that picking
a white maid might appear arrogant to their white neighbors, and not to
give a "sister" a job. Rather, a black maid gives the Spaders an easy
excuse any time some element of African-American culture, such as a copy
of Jet or Ebony magazine, is found by a white person visting
their home. But while the ending of the book is also extreme and symbolic,
it is chilling rather than hilarious, unless your sense of humor happens to
frequent the gallows.
Still, whether you talk about it's beginning, middle, or ending, Good Fences
does an excellent job in critiquing rather than simply criticizing the pit-falls
of people in general and black people in particular who blindly embrace
the so-called American Dream of material splendor amidst spiritual and cultural
desolation. No matter which side of the white picket fence you call home or
aspire to one day reside, Good Fences is a novel that contains
truths and insights
into a "house" that is more than a simple "fixer-upper".
Throughout Fire, Baldwin questioned whether assimilation into
mainstream (and thus white) culture was a rational goal for
African-Americans: in his analogy, that mainstream culture was a
house already on fire, ablaze in it's own contradictions and shallow
consumer values, and he felt it was ridiculous for black Americans to "move in"
to such a social structure in the face of it's imminent collapse.
by
Gloria Naylor
There were some complaints about the lack of
positive black male characters in Women: when the book was turned
into a television mini-series in the 1980's, conscious efforts were
made to improve the images of several of the African-American men in
the story (and the reference to one of the few "good" men in the
story, who happened to be white, was eliminated altogether). Whether
Women deserved
this treatment is debatable, but from Alice Walker's Color Purple
to Terry
McMillian's Waiting To
Exhale to the Million Man March, there has
been a growing effort to discourage negative portrayals of black men
in the media. Men of Brewster
Place may have been a response to this
movement, not to mention the obsession that publishers seem to have
with "sequels", and the fact that Ms. Naylor has been a long time
between books that she no doubt was paid in advance to
write.
But if a more sympathetic or positive view of
black men was her goal, doing so through the literary device of a
kind of parallel sequel ("para-quel?" "e-quel"?) toWomen of Brewster Place is a
peculiar way for her to accomplish it.
Naylor is not an author who
drowns you in exhuastive, soap operatic "back-stories" for each of
her characters, but she does not deal in stereotypes, either: her
characterization is always precise and sure, with nothing wasted and
nothing neglected in the service of her larger story.
For that
reason, there are few real revelations that arise in the new book as
a result of her revisiting her male characters from Women : it would be both harsh
and incorrect to call these new portrayals simple re-hashes from the
old book, but there are few new insights if you have already read
Women. The
"good" men remain good, while the "bad" ones are understood somewhat
better, but not to any degree that would explain or excuse their
behavior to any greater degree than in the first novel. Thus, if it
was Ms. Naylor's intention to create positive yet complex male
characters, she might have been better served by writing an entirely
new book, instead of re-examining those in a previous one.
But don't get me wrong: Men of Brewster Place is a
GOOD book,
particularly when compared to the plethora of designer label
name-droppin' "Girlfriend you gotta get a man" books that are
currently cluttering the shelves. As a piece of literature,
Men of Brewster Place doesn't quite "stand alone" as it's dust jacket "blurb"
claims, and you'd be advised to read Women
of Brewster Place to better underst and
Men and what it
is trying to do.
Blessings
by Sheneska Jackson
all of whom work or interact at a beauty
parlor owned by one of the women. The result is a book that requires
a scorecard to keep track of all the action, even though the stories of
any one of the quartet of main characters would have made a excellent novel
all by itself.
Had Jackson focused on just one of these women,
she would have beaten the plot-device overkill that
plagued her first two books. Each of the four protagonists has a reasonable
and realistic set of problems and issues with which to deal, and it is shame that
Jackson didn't take this approach: the progress she has made in
realistically dealing with characters and their development continues
in Blessings. If the author had concentrated on just one or two
characters, she would have had room to more thoroughly explore their
feelings, motivations, and the ins and outs of the challenges in
their lives.
By
comparison, Joe's first book, He
Say, She Say, was a more
substantial read, as it mixed much keener observations about
both sides of the mating game as her characters went
through the black middle-class version of those Jane Austen
"comedy of manners" novels that get turned into PBS
mini-series every ten minutes. But in comparison to her earlier work,
Bebe's By Golly Wow
never really makes it to even this basic level of
intellectual involvement, and simply tells the now much-told
tale of trying to nail down a decent spouse before the
biological clock stops ticking. He
Say, She Say was a good enough
book, though, that we can hope that Bebe's is simply another
example of "sophomore slump" among the new generation of
African-American writers.
Good Hair, telling another insubstantial tale of brand-name
dropping Buppie's scrambling to find true love. But Little's
second and latest book,The
Itch , while s ti ll basically more
of this same-old same-old, adds some in-depth commentary
concerning those proverbial wedding-bell blues, including
the fa ct that sometimes you can find the seemingly "per fect "
person and still end up alone. Thus, The
Itch gets a partial nod for being
better than it's predecessor, and making the point that
marital bliss may not be a realistic goal upon which to hang
all of your hopes for happiness in the modern
world.
