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DANCING IN THE DARK

Name: DANCING IN THE DARK
Author: Caryl Phillips
ISBN: 1-4000-4396-4

by Caryl Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2005

The author’s depiction of the culture’s racial dynamic will surely cause a stir.

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A provocative, illuminating novel that imagines the inner life and explores the cultural legacy of Bert Williams, the first popular black stage performer of America’s early 20th century.

Born in the West Indies, Williams delighted white audiences and embarrassed his family and associates by playing the bumbling, slow-witted “coon” or “nigger,” corking his visage in blackface. He considered this stereotype a peculiarly American phenomenon, unknown in his homeland. Was he the artistic creator of his role, or was he the prisoner of it? Williams claimed that the caricature should not offend since it had no basis in reality, but it plainly reinforced a popular prejudice, one that put strict limitations on acceptable roles for a performer of his color. West India–born novelist and cultural critic Phillips (A Distant Shore, 2003, etc.) employs Williams to explore themes of racial identity and the twisted relationship between black artists and white audiences. Though generally avoiding polemic, the novel’s implications extend from the minstrelsy of a hundred years ago to the marketing of today’s hip-hop and gangsta rap. While interspersing snippets from stage productions and newspaper accounts, the novelist takes considerable creative license in fictionalizing the reflections of the comic entertainer, a man of sad dignity and ambiguous sexuality who keeps the various parts of his life compartmentalized. Structured into three acts, the novel traces the rise and fall of the team of Williams and the more assertively political George Walker, whose partnership formed the first all-black company to achieve success on Broadway, a triumph both enhanced and undermined by Bert’s ability to play the fool. In rescuing Williams’s reputation from obscurity, Phillips gives his leading man a tragic dimension. As times were changing—from Harlem’s transformation into a nightlife mecca to the heavyweight championship of Jack Johnson to the assertive activism of W.E.B. Dubois—Williams couldn’t change with them.

The author’s depiction of the culture’s racial dynamic will surely cause a stir.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4396-4

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ANOTHER MAN IN THE STREET
by Caryl Phillips

- BOOK REVIEW
A VIEW OF THE EMPIRE AT SUNSET
by Caryl Phillips

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOST CHILD
by Caryl Phillips

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.