Customer Reviews

Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

I found this book to be an open minded one, expressing many different viewpoints from many different people, hammering home the idea that the invidual and his/her freedom to make decisions should be the goal and landmark of America... It is also clear to me that Crouch has an amazing scope of knowledge, from music to literature to culture. The book is full of racial stereotypes coming from the mouths of the characters. But for every one of these characters, there exists an open minded, analytical thinker to counterbalance them. These conversations are the highlight of the book in my mind. The other highlight is Crouch's attempt to dissect jazz and other musical forms on paper, to try and recreate the actual song being played on to paper, giving us a reason for each note, stanza, etc. The big problem in this book, in my opinion, was that it seemed that Crouch was trying too hard in some instances to create the perfect sentence, leading to excess and cluttered verbeage. Some passages flowed beautifully, others dragged very slowly. As a result, the book seemed choppy and discongruent. I've always liked Stanley Crouch. He's bold, unafraid to speak his mind, intelligent, and witty. These characteristics come out in his first novel, a book about an interracial relationship between two musicians, their biographical histories, and their difficulties they encounter trying to hold their relationship together.. I've seen Crouch many times on TV, and although I don't always agree with him, I've always wanted to go have beers with him..

I loved Stanley Crouch's book. It presents black characters in ways that are rarely presented in fiction, as people who talk about life with wit and humor on a very civilized level. They talk about justice and the purpose of existence. They talk about literature (Shakespeare), about classical music (Wagner), about painting (Leonardo and Picasso). And when they discuss jazz - as is to be expected in a book about a black jazz saxophone soloist and a white woman from Idaho who becomes a serious jazz singer - they talk not only about the feeling of jazz but about its content and the ideas that underlie it. Another strikingly original aspect of this book is that Crouch represents religion in our society as a powerful and stabilizing force (his description of a black church service in Houston is compelling and masterly). Is Crouch discursive?  Of course he is, but so was Shaw, and how about Homer?

As an admirer of Crouch's essays, I was looking forward to this book. But fiction is an art that Crouch has not come anywhere near mastering as he has done with the essay form. This book reads like a stream-of-consciousness first draft that went straight to the publisher. Where is that laser-like precision with language Crouch is noted for? Not in this book.

I don't think that I have ever read a more astonishing inward realization of a woman's life and memory and desire and feeling. As a Shakespeare scholar and a teacher of that great, great master for 30 years, I can confidently say that this novel is truly Shakespearean in its uncanny sense of capturing, without ego or intrusion, the soul and the idiom of a character. Each character is pure and unique and possessed of a distinct language. As a woman born and raised in the Midwest, I was equally startled by how accurately Stanley Crouch captured the style, the feeling, the speech, and the thinking of those particular Americans, among the many, many others he so powerfully and sensitively presents to us. This is a courageous book and it request that we be courageous readers willing to experience the great beauties and the enormous hurts the main character has to live through and witness as she is taught the many, many ways that race and sex and class touch and turn us in the world we inhabit right now. The insights into how men and women relate across the lines of color and class are unexceeded by any writing of which I am aware. These are the human things that people talk about privately when the subject of race comes around but that no one has written of until now, especially, on one level, the psychological and emotional intricacies that come into play when black and white women must truly face each other, setting aside all of the assigned roles and opening up to each other. Who would have thought a man would ever get something like that right? But this is an epic in the classical sense. It is a novel brimming over with ideas that are equaled by the panorama of emotion delivered by all of these three-dimensional characters who arrive from so many parts of our society. We move back and forth from the high to the low and through just about everything in between but we, even when what we experience is terrifying or shocking, are never debased. To read this book we have to live more fully in our humanity in the very same way that we must when Shakespeare sets his world of people before us in all their pain and wit and splendor. That is why we are enlarged by the broad substance of this novel, which has to be one of the great ones. There are definitely more than enough instances in this text for one to call it, without hyperbole, a work of absolute genius.

I found "Don't The Moon Look Lonesome" to be a marvelous illuminating novel on America, and on race. I liked the wide sweep in the novel, and I find the fact that Crouch takes no one point of view, there are no stereotypes in this novel, amazingly refreshing. Crouch sees America to be an essentially mixed culture, and that our survival depends on ourselves accepting -- and celebrating -- that we are part of this mixed culture. Crouch's musical training -- his expertise on jazz -- serves him well, as there is a terrific undercurrent of the Blues and swing in this novel. Most important, the characters are original and great. Carla, the complicated white protagonist, carries the story forward. I think this is definetely a must book for those who want to know and understand what's happened to America since the l960s.

Stanley Crouch has written a novel that embodies the strength, granduer and magic of Twain, Faulkner and Ellison. One could--and should--add Thomas Mann to that list, because of the vast intellectual depths brought to these endlessly probing and illuminating pages. Indeed, it is a seminal achievement in American fiction. On the dust jacket of this great novel, Saul Bellow writes: "In matters of race, few Americans feel that they can say exactly what they think. What one feels in reading "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" is an immediate relief from the burden of ideology, from 'more of the same.' For Stanley Crouch, the facts are color free." Bellow has it right. In Carla, the protagonist of a novel as rich and many-layered as a serving of Baklava, Crouch has created a woman who belongs in the Pantheon with Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina but, unlike those tragic, doomed women, Carla survives and grows as she passionately embraces the cards life has dealt her. But a secondary wonder of Crouch's mastery as a novelist is the care, understanding and compassion he bestows on his supporting cast. Ah, how these satellites orbit around Carla's glowing moon! How brilliantly they shine in the refracted light! How he cocoons them within the penumbra of Blues and Swing! In scene after textured scene, Crouch runs the scale. What a stunning achievement he has wrought...!

with the pages as his bandstand, crouch is a jazz musician, and his gig is personal and territorial identity. crouch blows a charlie parker kind of story of reversal of a white woman who could be said to be acting black, a switch from the familiar accusation of blacks acting white. carla hamsun has a big boody (boody is crouch's word for what beyonce calls booty), a black woman's boody, and carla sings jazz and carla has a black lover, her third, maxwell davis, tenor saxophone's traditional continuation of ben webster, lester young, john coltrane and sonny rollins, and carla can cook collards and chitlins. all to the good for her man, max, until carla, former ice queen from south dakota, sniffs something funky with their relationship: max is distancing himself from their five year duet after hearing the big band screaming a sound of: hi de hi de ho, what you doing with that white girl? come on back home to your own. and so they both journey. like homer's ulysses, carla travels down the rivers of memory and on a trip to houston with max to visit his parents and on a night singing and hanging out with friends, the end of the evening endured by this white woman listening to black intellectuals spew more self race hating vitriol than the entire gangsta rap industry, concluding with her being by her lonesome, like homer's penelope, waiting for her ulysses to come home from an overseas gig. but this is carla's story with the colors of the national spectrum, new york city and south dakota and houston, with a side trip to connecticut, seen through carla's eyes and insides, and max, although her lover man, a co-star with less face time.

crouch includes an afterward to the vintage paperback volume, where he speaks of swinging for the bleachers (interesting metaphor, here the word `swing' refers to the great american pastime, and in the subtitle: a novel in blues and swing, the word refers to the american musical form) as setting out to write the great american novel. crouch's language is an impasto of metaphor and description laid on thick in page long sentences in a narrative style with little dialogue.

crouch pays homage in his styling to william faulkner and ralph ellison, and, probably not by intention, but glaringly evident are the themes and style of james baldwin, both men chronicling stories about jazz musicians, the choice of narration over dialogue, the interracial lovers, and on pages 280 and 281 there's what the critic, henry louis gates, called a `trope' of baldwin's title `the devil finds work'. foreign influences cited by crouch, in addition to homer, are george eliot and james joyce.

one of my favorite sentences, one of his shorter sentences, is a summation of a metaphor of a diamond for maxwell's playing, on page 16, `there was a blue star in his tone'.

in the section of his afterward entitled `duets, trios and triplets' crouch loses the readers interest by mentioning scenes in which two or three characters are in. more appealing are examples he omitted to mention, like my favorite, the artist triplet of monet's waterlilies in new york city, rothko's chapel in houston, and picasso's vollard mentioned by an artist friend of carla's introduced to her by maxwell.

Stanley Crouch's work has always provoked thought and animated ideas on either side of the spectrum. Just take a look at the rest of the reviews on this site! I'm a musician and I believe that Stanley Crouch is a genius whose debut novel is THE finest example of jazz fiction ever written. His characters are clearly a blend of major jazz figures (as Crouch probably knew them first-hand) and provide the reader with an intimate portrait of the complexity of the jazz life -- an analogy can easily be drawn from this to the complexity of American life. Carla ruminates over her failing inter-racial relationship in a profoundly introspective narrative that flips time around in a thrilling manner I've only experienced listening to Tony Williams' drumming. Read this book with an active attention to detail, plot complexity, and the lyrical beauty of the dialogue and your life will be enriched.

I quit after just a few pages of this book, because Crouch made some errors unworthy of a professional writer, misusing "whom" as the subject of a sentence, and making up a Yiddish word "zhlulbby," when he presumably meant "zhlubby." Crouch claims Saul Bellow as a "mentor," but I wonder whether Bellow (who lauds the book on the inevitable back-cover blurb) even read this novel.

The problems that Crouch was trying to write about deserve better treatment than this.

honestly, i did...i spent over a month trying to get into it, even skipped some chapters. sometimes i think crouch tries too hard to show readers that he can write, by utilizing multiple voices, flashbacks, etc. it left me confused and it made the story very hard to follow. i tried to stick with it, because i loved the subject of interracial love, but the convoluted telling frustrated me..i may go back to it later...sometimes, less is more, stanley...