Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

Rating:
Summary: Rich portrait of African American family in So. California
Review: There's a great deal to enjoy and think about in this richly detailed novel of a young man's emergence into manhood, discovering himself as a father-to-be, and wanting more than anything to become a responsible parent and family man like his own father. These are working class people, living in what I take to be Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, scraping lives together and not giving up on each other.

Darnell, the hero, rides close to the edge of failure as his fortunes rise and fall and rise again, first as a temporary firefighter battling brush fires in the mountains and later running a small gardening business keeping yards in a middle class housing development. Straight paces her narrative slowly and builds plenty of tension as we watch Darnell come into his own, often through trial and error, with so many of the odds stacked against him.

Straight is a fine Southern California writer, and her book was for me a very readable and engaging introduction to a world that is seldom written about so warmly and eloquently.

Rating:
Summary: Landmark in American Literature
Review: This exquisite book details the flora and fauna of firebreaks in California. One has to think of Thomas Hardy's descriptions of the moors in _Return of the Native_ and Willa Cather's _My Antonia_ for historical "paintings" of flora.

Here we find the flora and fauna, the patois of an African-American community, the spinning wheels and danger of a ride for a drug connection which the protagonist is not a part of, and the protagonist making a "nest" for his wife and child to come, and thereafter.

Appearance and police stereotyping, the diverse communities and relations, vis a vis Mexican American and African American workers.

This is an astounding major landmark on the landscape of American fiction.