Nate [Paperback]

P. Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2006

Nathan James Morris: a talented, ambitious black kid from P.G. County, Maryland. He wants to be an illustrator. But at 19, he has been expelled from Freedom College for alleged misconduct. He has few friends, aside from the parasitic Guy Sellers; and save for his scholarship's chump change, even fewer dollars. Hurt, angry, and in desperate need of cash, he joins the Marines. "The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!" he loudly boasts. But he soon discovers that his own “road” has been paved with far more unpleasant things: whimsical officers, endless bomb attacks, disease, an unbelievable desolation. After the military, his “road” gets rockier....an unhappy reuniting with family, friends and fiancee....a kidnaping in Turkey ....violent confrontations with neo-Nazis and racist North Africans....his studies and miseries at C.S.U., America’s most prestigious black university, and his final days in a DC slum, as witness to (and participant in) the wild destruction of his older brother’s marriage, with a little help from the one “friend” who never seems to leave him be: Guy Sellers. At turns eloquent, elegant, explosive, raw, obscene, shockingly brutal and wildly funny, NATE is a brilliant meditation on what it means to be young, black and male in today’s world.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

NATE is the second novel by controversial author P. Lewis--an explosive mix of satire, invective and wild humor, an absurd tale of Nathan James Morris, a twenty-something black man trying to find his way in the Reagan-Bush years.

About the Author

Born in Atlanta and raised just outside Washington, D.C., P. Lewis graduated from Howard University in 1992. His first book, LIFE OF DEATH, was published by Fiction Collective in 1993. He has worked as a dishwasher in D.C., a temp in New York City and Rockville, Maryland; with these earnings he was able to get lost in Egypt, Greece, Brazil, Romania, Berlin, among other places. He is currently "at large," in his own words.

Product Details

• Paperback: 411 pages
• Publisher: Back House Books (January 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967195101
• ISBN-13: 978-0967195100
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,497,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Internet Kings review, October 31, 2007

By 

G.O.D.F.A.T.H.A. "The Internet King" (Jacksonville, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nate (Paperback)

This is a great book to grab. I read it and I must say that this book is very interesting indeed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explosive, absurdist look at modern America, November 24, 2006

By 

Bookdude (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nate (Paperback)

I was blown away at this book. It reminds me a lot of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey To The End of the Night, with some of Ellison's Invisible Man, though I see more echoes of Celine's book than Ellison's. Nate Morris, like Celine's Bardamu, leaves his familiar surroundings early in the book to join the military. Unfortunately, Nate is overwhelmed by the brutal training, the racism, and the unbelievable brutality of his unit and his fellow soldiers. After leaving the military, he is so shattered that basically he drifts throughout the rest of the novel into one disaster after another, finally ending as a semi-derelict.

Like Bardamu, he is persistently hounded by a double, named Guy Sellers. Guy is the African American Leon Robinson--only a lot worse. He is everything Nate isn't, and yet, his own egotism, vanity and viciousness compliments Nate's self-asorbed alienation from both the white and black Americas. Guy's insanity helps pull the novel towards a devastating climax.

The one problem I had with this novel is the women in the book. Many of them seem to be quite nasty, almost no better than whores. With the exception of his white, Jewish girlfriend Claudia(at the book's end), virtually all of the women in this book come off as negative, though admittedly the men aren't much better.

Though this book is supposedly set back in the Reagan and Bush I era(from the references), it might as well be happening now: wars in the Middle East(which inflict psychological damage on the main character, Nate), racism, black on black violence, etc. This book is unlike anything being published by today's African-American writers. The "plot" is topsy-turvy, often recrossing itself several times as the book progresses, yet never returns to the same. Highly recommended.