Customer Reviews

The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger: A Novel (The Dark Tower Series)

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This one is a cult classic, a story with messages that resonate long after we've put it down. One of my three or four all-time favorites. Brown has the gift of the storyteller's ear and voice, and an instinctive feel for the trope and rhythm of language. If it were put to music, it would be a combination of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. A cover-to-cover "bright moment"

The re-release of Cecil Brown's 1969 classic is long overdue. The man's insights and vision are haunting in their lyricism, and his messages pack a punch. Cecil Brown is a natural, and I've missed his fiction all these years. Not to be missed

This book is beautifully written, full of anger and sex, blatant truths and subtle descriptions of interpersonal relations. It captures the experience of a person trying to escape his past by making a philosophy and lifestyle out of jive, prevarication, self-imposed exile, promiscuity and drugs. Even more important, Jiveass shows how the protagonist gets out of the escapist thinking and behaviors and becomes ready to return to his home country--the site of all of the formative traumas of his life. The sex scenes are potentially distracting--but each contains luminous descriptions of the mental state that carries the participants through these rather fraught encounters, and reads dangerously true about how people with different amounts of power in the world (and different senses of their relationship to racial difference) behave sexually to each other. As George Washington (the protagonist) progresses through the novel, these scenes embody his changing awareness of the women he is involved with--and thus his changing relationship with the world that leads to his decision to return to the United States.

Overall, this is one of the best works of fiction I have read--a truly valuable work.

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today's impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person's shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown's classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I didn't want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60's Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington's encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering "What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?" When Washington realizes that "everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides" (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where "the battleground is a bit more familiar" (206).

In his introduction, Louis Gates, Jr. recalls that among his friends at Yale Brown's book was "a required text on our veritable `Quest for Blackness'" (x). I don't pretend to know or understand what lessons he derived about African-American identity from Life and Loves, but the return of Washington to America where the battleground is familiar might be one. The gigolos in Brown's book are all expatriates escaping the racism and violence of the South, of America. Yet, what they find in Europe is not essentially different. The white women do not desire them for their persons but for their color. The existentialism of Europe seems to Washington to be just another way for whites to get in touch with their blackness. America may be a place that doesn't allow him to write a "serious book," but it's a place where he understands the situation.

I also stayed with the book because while George Washington is careering through women left and right, he displays a self-awareness and understanding that is endearing. At first, his knowledge makes him appear the rapacious player, but as you watch the emptiness dawn on him, a core of inner humanity peeks out. Mr. Jiveass might be a slick negotiator, but he can't jive himself for too long, and in the end, not at all.

Gates calls attention to the postmodern epilogue in which Brown tells his character "All is jive" (212) and encourages him that in the end, after "the intellectuals [pick] through your soul....You will have them understand what you mean by jive" (213). In a new preface written for this edition, Brown suggests that "Jive is a philosophy, for sure, but it is also a door. Open it and enter" (xxii). Brown certainly opens a door into a world of experience alien to me racially, but it's also a world that is not entirely foreign. It is a world in which people's self-serving behavior robs them of humanity, a world in which escaping from overt oppression leads to a more insidious, creeping imprisonment, a world in which freedom from does not lead to freedom in. And the kind of life that leads to that world and may be required in that world is certainly something I could understand as jive.

The last review written "if you want to get an idea of why interracial relationships happen: read this" is so limited in it's view point that I felt the need to write a review. I liked this book very much after reading it for an African American authors in Europe book, but I must feel the need to say that if you're looking for anything other than traditional ideas of Black Nationalism you must find another book. Yes, the book is interesting, "Blacks in Copenhagen? in the 70's? who wuddathunkit. But, this book is painstakingly stereotypical, in that the main character, George Washington *cough* goes to conquer Europe and symbolically does so by having sex with white women. Slightly overly sexual.
If you're looking for books that diverge from and don't merely accept Black Nationalist thought as truth without thinking about it, I suggest reading City of Light, by Cyprus Colter.

if you want to get a gist of why interracial relationships happen, read this. also, you will come to figure out why why blacks feel the way they do about whites. one of the best books ever written about blacks in europe...