A big new novel by James Baldwin is always of major interest, and
there are scenes here of Baldwin at his earthy, lyrical best. But
this rambling book lacks overall shape, and Baldwin seems
self-consciously intent on sour lip-chewing, on talking around and
beyond white readers: to see him crumpling into jive-and-slap
insularity is dismaying, he whose anger isn't by nature clogged and
stingy but churchly, prophetic, and outcast. The chief narrative
here belongs to Arthur Montana, the "Soul Emperor," a famous black
gospel singer done-in finally by the combined injuries of being
good of heart, black, musical, and homosexual; but the book is
really a troika of three barely-yoked-together themes, all of which
Baldwin has done better by before. Baldwin-the-exile writes as
brilliantly as ever about how it was and is: touring the South in
the Fifties, going into a bar or a store if you're black. There is
the portrait of Sister Julia, a child preacher (as Baldwin was),
her calling ended at the hands of her brutalizing father, then her
placeless wandering as a black, childless woman in a white world.
And the love scenes, as usual with Baldwin, are maudlin, but
Arthur's first love affair with one of his back-up singers, Crunch,
is very moving and deftly done. Wonderful, too, are the church
concerts, the singing and testifying - but the sermonizing that
precedes or follows them dispirits. Baldwin seems to have lost his
way fictionally; he presses doggedly on here, but the path never
clarifies. Bathos aplenty, anger folded-down too minutely, energy
frittered - a book that seems to have imploded along the way.
(Kirkus Reviews)
'This is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his
powers' Edmund White, Washington Post When Arthur Montana,
world-renowned 'Emperor of Soul', is found dead in a London pub,
his grief-stricken brother looks back over thirty years in the
lives of their group of friends: from their childhood spent
preaching and singing in Harlem churches, to their struggles with
war and poverty, and their encounters with wealth, love and fame.
Set against a vividly drawn background of the civil rights movement
of the sixties, Baldwin's last novel is a monumental saga that
ranges from New York to Paris, Korea to Africa to portray how
profoundly racial politics can shape life, especially in the
private business of love. 'Warm, melancholy . . . Hall Montana's
voice is the conduit for Baldwin's most distinctive quality as a
writer, his abundant tenderness' The New York Times
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