Review of the Day: Black Boy (American Hunger)

Richard Wright is famous for his novel, Native Son, which is a classic of American realism, made it to the Modern Library’s list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, and was the first Book of the Month Club title by an African-American author. His autobiography – at least part of it – is an acclaimed account of life in the Jim Crow South.

Only the first part of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, was published contemporaneously with his finishing it in 1945. The second part, American Hunger, was not published until 1977.

Understandably. The Black Boy section of his autobiography tells the story of Wright's childhood in the Deep South in the early part of the 1900s. Born on a plantation, abandoned by his father, and raised by a passel of relatives, his was as racist, poverty-stricken, and generally grim a childhood as could be imagined. But American Hunger, the second part of his autobiography is all about Wright’s life as a Communist. Not a sympathetic, leftist intellectual of the 1930s, but a full-fledged, card-carrying Party member and true believer. No wonder he could not get this part of his story published in the 1950s. It would have been scandalous.

Now, after the horrors of Stalin are known and the Soviet Union has disappeared, his story is historically notable, but borderline ludicrous. What is worse is that Wright does not delve into the ideas that made him a Communist, which might have been interesting. He provides only one glowing summary of his fervent belief that Communism was the only solution for mankind, that the world would be in awe of the success of this system based on self-sacrifice, and that Europe would be unable to stand up to the military might of the Soviet Union. He offered this as an introduction to his description of the “glory” of the Soviet-style show trial of one of his Comrades. The rest focuses on the in-fighting among Party members.

Wright's whole point seems to prove that he was the better Communist than the hacks running the Party.  He recounts the maneuverings among factions that led to his election as the Party Secretary of his division, detailed conversations with Party sub-officials questioning his loyalty, and his ultimate break with the Party – not over ideology, he insists, but tactics. All this is as tedious as listening to the office receptionist relate the details of her long-standing feud with the HR department.

The Black Boy section of Wright’s autobiography is a must-read. The American Hunger section belongs, like the bankrupt ideology that inspired it, in the dustbin of literary history.

Summery Books

Now that summer is here (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), what is the most “Summery” book you can think of? The one that captures the essence of summer for you? (I’m not asking for you to list your ideal “beach reading,” you understand, but the book that you can read at any time of year but that evokes “summer.”)

This is harder than it seems. There are several books that make me think of hot weather, such as Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry or the whole Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, but those are books set in hot climates, not books related to summer in particular. There are also a few books that remind me of summer because I happened to read them in the summer, like Jim Harrison's pre-The Road Home novels, which I tore through in the summer of 1994. But I guess if I had to pick one novel that captures the idea of summer, I would go with Huckleberry Finn. The adventures, the river, the kid out of school -- it all feels like summer. In fact, this one is going back on my TBR shelf to re-read this summer.

Author of the Day: Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is a favorite author of mine because I enjoyed High Fidelity so much.


I did not realize he had so many non-fiction books in addition to his novels. Fever Pitch is a memoir about being an avid football fan. Songbook is a collection of essays inspired by certain pop songs. The last three on the list intrigue me the most because they are collections of Hornby's book reviews from The Believer magazine.

Those I have read are in red; those on my TBR shelf are in blue.

Novels
(1995) High Fidelity (reviewed here)
(1998) About a Boy
(2001) How to Be Good
(2005) A Long Way Down
(2007) Slam
(2009) Juliet, Naked (reviewed here)

Non-Fiction
(1992) Fever Pitch
(2003) Songbook (called 31 Songs in England)
(2004) The Polysyllabic Spree (reviewed here)
(2006) Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
(2008) Shakespeare Wrote for Money

NOTE
Last updated on March 19, 2012.

Opening Sentences of the Day: The Beggar and Changing Places

"White clouds floated in the blue expanse overlooking a vast green land where cows grazed serenely. " -- The Beggar by Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature. I am trying to read at least one book by every Nobel Laureate. The Beggar was the first Malfouz book to make it on to my TBR shelf. Not famous like his Cairo Trilogy, this is a 1965 novella about contemporary (1965) Egypt. So far, The Beggar is a little sparse and a little vague, which is why I was lured into starting Changing Places by David Lodge. Opening sentence: "High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour." That's a good one. Lodge caught my attention with How Far Can You Go?, which made it on to Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels and my list of favorites for 2008. This 1975 novel tracks an American and a British professor as they swap university spots for a semester.

Review of the Day: High Fidelity

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is the guy version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, only even funnier.

Rob, the slacker hero, mopes around his used record store, obsessing on the girlfriend who just dumped him and on all his prior failed relationships. Fanatically opinionated, phobic about commitment, and neurotic to the core, Rob is the Everyman of the post-sexual revolution era. There is a little something of Rob in all bad boyfriends and good husbands, which is what makes him so appealing.

In keeping with the theme of the book, my Top Five Favorite Lines from High Fidelity, in the order of appearance:

Discussing his first real girlfriend: “Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breasts that I would try to touch between her legs, a gesture that had a sort of self-parodying wit about it: it was like trying to borrow a fiver, getting turned down, and asking to borrow fifty quid instead.”

Discussing teenage romance in general: “Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion . . . it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex – they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.”

“They’re as close to being mad as makes no difference.”

Discussing obscure bands: “[S]omeone with a cult following which could arrive together in the same car.”

“[M]y friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.”

Why, why, why did I wait so long to read this book? If I had read it when it came out in 1995, I could have already re-read it a couple of times. Now I have to wait at least a few years to enjoy it fresh and I don’t want to wait.

OTHER REVIEWS

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(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)