This is the strange story of a young man, a future Harvard alumnus of some note, who grows up on a remote island (in a city of eight million people, twenty-six percent of whom share his ethnicity), but is forced to attend the elite Punahou Academy on the island's Upper East Side where he experiences racial troping when he's frequently mistaken for the son of a U.N. diplomat.
Every summer he and his brother are shipped off to the family's house in the black Hamptons, where he learns to connect with what Toni Morrison, in describing Bill Clinton, called "almost every trope of blackness": working for minimum wage at fast-food joints, learning to "play the dozens," and engaging in gunplay. In fact, when he gets a job at the ice cream parlor he's required to ask each customer, "Would you like any allegorical implications with that?"
The family is extremely strange too. His father chose a career in podiatry because, and I quote, "All the black people I knew, they had some bad feet," eerily echoing the sentiments of a former Secretary of Agriculture. His mother, a New Yorker and future corporate lawyer who would one day inherit one of her parents' two summer homes, seems to recall getting on the grapevine "to spread the word" when the TV sitcom "Julia," starring Diahann Carroll, premiered in 1968, that memorable year.
Finally, it must be said that this is The Autobiographical Fourth Novel, not The Autobiographical First Novel, however, it was once widely believed that The Autobiographical Second Novel had already been written, with its Harvard-like setting and it's main character, a young journalist who works for a (Village Voice-like?) New York City tabloid.
I give it three stars, a solid "good" rating. And thanks again to B & N and the group!
Melissa_W
on:
Red Dawn of the Dead
L_Monty
on:
Cluelysses
