Dark Reflections (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In 1987's rainy October, when squirrels stopped, stared, then sprinted along the bench-backs away from the kids with the earrings, combat boots, and dog collars,..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of the captivating latest by the Hugo-winning author of Dhalgren is also the title of a book of poems written by the novel's poet protagonist, Arnold Hawley. That might strike one as a more straightforward setup than that of Pale Fire. But given that Delany is a poet who gave up writing poetry for a more financially rewarding career writing sci-fi and memoir, and that the fictional Hawley is the same age as Delany and is also black and gay, the reader familiar with Delany's work soon feels that these "dark reflections" form a fascinatingly structured experiment in alternative autobiography—what if Delany had remained a poet and not turned to prose? Hawley's career as a semisuccessful poet istold in reverse, its three sections take the poet from obscure old age to the dawning of youthful ambition. In contrast to the exuberant explorations of the East Village's sexual underworld in Delany's memoirs, poor Hawley's sexual career never really gets off the ground—"what if" for Delany had not come to terms with his sexuality during early 1960s? Delany transforms poetry's status as the most ignored field of American letters into a devastating and beautifully written study of the loneliness and despair that so often accompany the life of the mind in America. (May)
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From The Washington Post

Samuel Delany's new novel is a triptych -- a biography, in reverse, of a poet we see at three stages in life. On the first panel, a decrepit writer is dining with his young editor; on the second, a middle-aged groom searches for sex in a public restroom on his wedding night; in the third, a college boy falls in love.

The figure in all three scenes is a man who, whenever he finds photographs of himself, invariably turns them over and writes on the back, "The poet Arnold Hawley." More specifically, Arnold Hawley is a black, gay poet who lives in Manhattan's East Village. Dark Reflections is a sort of love letter to that part of town, when it sheltered the homeless and the hustler in a way it no longer does.

Beneath the physical and psychological squalor, the humiliations of poetry and poverty, lies a certain nostalgie de la boue. The 10-year-old bookworm raised by an intellectual aunt who prefers Berg to Webern (Arnold's favorite) ends up "a very fragile" old man who wonders when he enters the subway whether the smell of urine is coming from him or the station. He is also unable to forget the remark a famous white poet made when a poet of color was admitted to a literary society: "Who let the coon in?"

His consciousness, however, remains essentially childlike. The same wonder is bestowed on dinner ("her veal -- which really was awfully good") as on the darkness of a restroom swarming with homosexuals ("Yes, there were men in here!").

In previous books, Delany has shown himself to be comfortable with both gay and straight, black and white milieus -- not to mention various literary forms -- but the hero of this heartfelt, often funny book is triply alienated. Looking at a beautiful oak door painted over, he thinks: "Some things were ruined, and you had to let them go, which was how, actually, Arnold had always thought about his own sexuality." His only brothers are brothers: other gay black male writers. Yet sex with men terrifies him. Meanwhile, the psychotics, policemen, hustlers and suicides he meets are mere obstructions to be endured till the next poem, mercifully, arrives.

In the end, like Doctor T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, he's nothing but a pair of spectacles. Yet Dark Reflections, while harrowing and bleak, is mainly tender -- a loving rendition of a place that gentrification has all but obliterated, a spot-on portrait of the East Village artist as a gay black geek.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (April 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786719478
• ISBN-13: 978-0786719471
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #383,009 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerfully Crafted, March 25, 2007

By	Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Delany, Samuel. "Dark Reflections", Carroll & Graf. 2007.

Beautifully Crafted

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

Due out on May 15 is an exceptional novel by Samuel Delany ("Dhalgren", "The Mad Man") which is sure to be a ht. It is so beautifully written and crafted that I had to sit up and take notice several times. "Dark Reflections" is the story of Arnold Hawley, a gay African-American New Yorker who is a poet. The book looks at Hawley's life in reverse. It is divided into three parts, "The Prize", "Vashti in the Dark" and "The Book of Pictures". The sheer honesty of the book is what makes it so special.
Book One begins when Hawley is fifty and he wins the Alfred Proctor Award for his sixth book of poetry. He has now risen to the height of his profession and has achieved a degree of literary success, Exactly eighteen years afterwards, Hawley published a new book which because of its lack of success causes him to be lonely and afraid to get any older. He breaks down when his aunt dies and he feels he cannot go to the funeral. Part One really deals with his fears, his mental condition, and his loneliness.
Part Two goes back to 1974 and Hawley's unhappy marriage to Judy Haindel. It seems that his wife has problems which bring about emotional and physical catastrophic consequences. It is in this section that Hawley writes his third book.
In "The Book of Pictures", Part Three of the novel we return to Brown And Hawley's college days and his first sexual experience with a male.
The three parts taken together give a beautiful look at the life of a successful gay African-American in a way that I do not think it has been portrayed before. We look at social attitudes, loneliness and a sense of triumph. The book also has something to say about Delany himself. Interestingly enough the name of Hawley's prize winning book of poems is the same as the author's most famous novel. Delaney, himself, wrote poetry until he gave it up for the financial rewards of writing science fiction and memoirs. Hawley and Delany are both African American gay men and I can only question that if "Dark Reflections" is a fictionalized look at the author's own life. Many different questions can be asked if this supposition is correct but the one thing above all else is deal with questions of loneliness and despair as one ages. The book is beautifully written and the story is complex. It is powerful in the way it deals with the issues it confronts and we can all be so much better off because of that. The honesty and truthfulness of the book makes this a sad story and is in opposition to what Delany usually gives us--fantasy. But it is the out and on the button honesty of the book that makes it so rewarding.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A dark reflection of Delany's own life, May 28, 2007

By	Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Even as a long-time fan of Samuel Delany's work (both fiction and non-fiction), I confess to finding it sometimes hard going (I still haven't finished Dhalgren!). But Dark Reflections is his most accessible book in a long time. Even though it's written "in reverse", starting with old age and progressing to youth, there's no difficulty following the narrative, and this would be a good book to start with if you've never read anything by Delany.

But the book takes on an added dimension for those of us who are Delany junkies, since in some way it is (and is not) autobiographical. Arnold Hawley, the central character, is a black gay writer only a little older than Delany, whose books have Delanyesque titles (one of them is actually the title of a Delany book). But his life is the opposite of Delany's... his books are unread (and not even in the New York Public Library!); his sole claim to success is having won one rather questionable prize (is it a coincidence that the author's bio on the back of the book mentions Delany's prizes?); his old age is utterly lonely and his emotional life completely unfulfilled. Even though, like Delany, he married, his marriage (which culminates in the most horrifyingly vivid events that I've ever read) surely did not, let us hope, resemble that of the author!

So what's going on? Is this a "what if" account (as the Publisher's Weekly review, cited above implies)? Rather, I think the title, which is at least triply ambiguous, gives the clue. These are dark reflections (thoughts) about a life, looked at as if reflected in a dark mirror (and, of course, narrated in reflected order). It's time to go reread it and see what I missed reading it the first time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Enriching, Satisfying, October 16, 2008

By	J. Conrad Guest (Northville, MI United States) - See all my reviews

I've followed Samuel R. Delany's career across galaxies for thirty years. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, Delany had written and published nine novels, two of them winning Nebulas for best science fiction. I've read most of his early work, including Dhalgren, considered by many to be the finest science fiction novel ever written, and, from later in his career, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, as well as the Neveryon series, his foray into the fantasy genre. As a boy I read Nova, Delany's tribute to the space opera genre and a forerunner to today's cyberpunk, which even now remains one of my favorite science fiction novels.

As a heterosexual, I didn't always relate to some of Delany's gay protagonists and storylines, but I always thrilled, even as a boy, to his use of language, his dense prose, descriptive narrative, and vivid imagination. When I began writing seriously it was Delany I endeavored to emulate.

In Dark Reflections, Delany, now a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University, steps away from the science fiction genre to give us a glimpse into the lonely life of Arnold Hawley, a black, gay poet living in Manhattan's East Village. Gone is the dense language that usually accompanies Delany's prose; but the story itself, related with simple honesty, is rife with complexities. A poet himself before turning to fiction, perhaps only Delany knows how much of Arnold's story is autobiographical, although his real life marriage to Marilyn Hacker, also a poet, ended much less tragically than Arnold's. Perhaps it is the alternate autobiography Delany would have written had he not turned to fiction writing.

One of the fascinating aspects of Dark Reflections (and there are many) is that it is told in three parts in reverse chronological order, perhaps to reflect what we see when we glance into the looking glass -- a reverse image of how others perceive us.

In part one, The Prize, Arnold, in his fifties, has just won the Alfred Proctor Award for his sixth book of collected poems. Arnold is the poster child for the starving artist, holding onto the $3,000 stipend the award pays out over three years as a financial godsend to his existence. Emerging writers who read Dark Reflections will take comfort from Arnold's insecurities and envy of others, while non-writers will be afforded a glimpse into the soul of a creative spirit -- its innocence and sensitivity, its desire for recognition. In response to praise for one of his collected works as "one of my favorite books of the last... well, thirty years! In any genre! Really! It's just an... an amazing performance!" Arnold later reflects:

"The fact is, there is no praise as great as the praise I want." He'd said it with tears welling. "That sort of praise doesn't exist -- I know that," Arnold had told Dr. Engles, on his side of the chipped table in the small blue room at Mount Sinai. "It doesn't stop me from wanting it, though -- wanting it so much!" Couldn't he have an entire evening without someone like Michael, sneakily and without warning, reminding him how little he'd had...

The Prize is perhaps the most movingly poignant part of the whole of Dark Reflections. Arnold himself, now sixty-eight and eighty pounds overweight (a mirror image of Delany's own girth), suffering incontinence (entering a subway he wonders if the smell of urine emanates from him or the subway) perhaps best sums up its content: Jesus, he thought, at last on the platform, a tear tickling his cheek, the tears of the old just don't mean anything, do they?

As poignant as The Prize is, part two, Vashti in the Dark, is the most shocking. Arnold, in his late thirties, sits outside a public restroom known to be a place where gay men rendezvous, fantasizing about what takes place inside but lacking the courage to partake, only once venturing inside only to flee in horror. It is here he meets a young homeless woman, Judy, perhaps fifteen years his junior. He befriends the shoeless Judy, takes her to lunch and subsequently buys her some shoes and clothing and brings her back to his apartment where the not quite right Judy, knowing of Arnold's proclivity for men, convinces Arnold that they should wed. A few days later, tested for disease and license in tow, they marry, and Judy's wedding gift to Arnold is to send him out to the public restroom to have the night of his life. Arnold returns to his apartment with young Tony to a shocking scene. This is Delany at his brilliant best, what he reveals both through the narrative as well as what is left unwritten.

The final segment, Book of Pictures, chronicles Arnold's youth as he wrestles with the "disease" a doctor tells him afflicts only one in five thousand men (a greatly skewed number) and with which no Negro has ever been diagnosed, and that he is sure will one day cut his life short.

Throughout the text Arnold, whenever he finds a photograph of himself, invariably turns it over to write on its back, The poet Arnold Hawley, aged -- in anticipation of the biography of his life that is never written. Underlying themes of Dark Reflections are poetry's status as the most ignored field in literature -- Arnold is haunted by the remark a famous white poet made when a poet of color was admitted to a literary society: "Who let the coon in?" -- as well as the loneliness and despair that all too often accompany the life of the creative soul.

Highly recommended reading.