Customer Reviews

Nate

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

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.