8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable First Novel, May 27, 2000
This review is from: Rails Under My Back (Hardcover)
This novel is a wonderful story told by the members of an extraordinary family. Each one of these characters are expertly fleshed out by Allen, who portrays a closely knit family of incredibly diverse personalities. Allen tells the story using snippets of perspective from each family member, so reading the story is like piecing a puzzle together, like reading the best of Faulkner. I haven't been so engrossed in the story of a family since I read Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel". Incidentally, these two books also have a common theme: that you can look back on where you've been, but you can never go back, and home is only where you happen to be today.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A bumpy ride..., March 22, 2001
This review is from: Rails Under My Back (Hardcover)
Here is a newer author who has demonstrated his voice is one that will be discernible in the overpopulated choir of modern writers. I just hope I get some clue as to what he is attempting to convey. I read the book slowly and carefully, very slowly and very carefully. I made copious use of the genealogical chart... as if I had a choice. Similarity in names among members of the extended family impeded my progress at several junctures. I tried to defer a final opinion until I had taken the time to re-evaluate, however the end result remained unchanged, confusion, with frustration a photo-finish second.
Without question, Jefrey Renard Allen is an up and coming wordsmith. He has the capability to evoke imagery of crystal clarity yet I found myself in a state of flux as to why I had been suddenly transported to a new time, place or generation. As far as I could tell and believe me, I read page by page, RAILS UNDER MY BACK is at its core the story of the interdependencies, aspirations, and failures of two doubly-bound families (brothers married to sisters) in a large northern city, some contrived amalgam of New York and Chicago. In all things relevant the rail system which I saw as a metaphor of family ties, was the instrument of definitive influence. The train/subway/elevated are equally a method of escape and the locus of security.
The book, set primarily in the 1970s, flows seamlessly from city to city, generation to generation, reality to surreal, and that in fact is one of the problems. Give me at a subtle clue we are moving on. I am not infering the transitions were haphazard in placement but they were not effectively introduced nor conducive to the reader's enjoyment.
RAILS is not oppressively long but it is a challenge to read. Regrettably, the end of the trip does not justify the rigors of the journey.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Rails" Follows the Tracks of Two Families", July 27, 2001
This review is from: Rails Under My Back (Hardcover)
...Jeffery Renard Allen's first novel presents the interwoven narratives of two extended families whose histories go back past the Great Migration to the middle of the nineteenth century. "Rails Under My Back" is partly autobiographical, but it is blessedly free of the personal grievances so typical of confessional writing. And though the subject of race figures naturally in the book, it differs from protest novels like Richard Wright's and from celebrations of African American life like Zora Neale Hurston's, in that it is driven by no particular racial agenda. Allen's themes are the ordinary mysteries of human beings anywhere: the fitful dynamics between generations, the various effects of minor events on different members of the same family, and the uniqueness of every human life, unfolding with its particular and unpredictable logic.
Twenty years ago the McShan sisters married the Jones brothers, conjoining two long-lived clans and establishing their homes in a Midwestern city rather like modern Chicago. Their teenaged children - - Hatch, the son of Sheila and Lucifer, and Jesus, son of Gracie and John - - were inseparable while growing up, but now they've drifted apart. Hatch, a voracious reader, wants a career in music; Jesus, smoldering with rages he doesn't wholly understand, gravitates toward gang life in the inner-city projects. As the narrative opens, 17-year-old Jesus is coming home only rarely, intimidating his relatives (including Hatch) with his iron eyes, bulletlike shaved head, and surly silences.
How did two boys so close in age, blood, and background turn out so differently? In Allen's book this question, explicitly the center of John Edgar Wideman's fine "Brothers and Keepers," is merely implied. But it offers a plot that's taut as well as subtle, in vectors of simultaneous construction and destruction. By acts of violence Jesus seeks to tear the family apart, even as Hatch and his sister Porsha, a successful model who has fallen in love with an inner-city hoodlum, try to connect their lives with family history. At times the characters experience personal bonds as bondage, and separation from loved ones feels a lot like freedom. Will Jesus break every tie of kinship and affection? Will Hatch follow Jesus into an urban wilderness?
Social criticism is implied in scenes from the city projects--the rust-bucket elevators, urinous halls, disintegrating families, paralyzing oscillations between random violence and inertia--and in the baffled, dead-end fates of Black men who helped fight their nation's wars. But no rancors lie behind these themes. There's no piousness, either, in the book's focus on people who daily, endlessly do menial jobs in order to maintain decent lives. Allen's characters have simply inherited a remarkable capacity for work from ancestors like Pappa Simmons, who said, "Labor is the deck. All else is the sea."
"Rails" is a long book. Though its recurrent railway journeys create a poetic coherence, they can be so dizzy we lose any sense of direction. Events sometimes merge confusingly, and a few plot threads are left dangling. Occasionally the prose reads like fragments shored against someone's ruin - - scraps of nursery rhyme, rap song, and jump-rope chant are juxtaposed with marginalia in family albums, an FBI clipping, an NAACP notice safety-pinned into a book, a funeral program. Maybe the unsigned letter found in a family Bible speaks for this novel's author: "It should be easy to follow the thread of my story The seams show." But even fans of postmodern pastiche will sometimes need to ask of Allen's book (as Porsha asks of the letter), "How am I sposed to read this?"
Still, Allen's characters, including his remarkable women, are uniquely imagined. His portrayals of married life are fresh and intelligent: the helpless love between Lucifer and Sheila gives neither a window on the other's surprising inner world, while Gracie, strangely tormented by the ghosts of babies, struggles to accept John's bad case of the walking blues. Porsha's work in photography studios is fascinating. Young men in the projects talk amazing trash, part horrifying menace and part comic bluster. Cityscapes unfold like prose-poems, flashbacks to stories of Whole Daddy and Pappa Simmons are marvelous, and the book has intriguing religio-mythic dimensions - - the names of Jesus and Lucifer are no accident.
Readers who love the works of Ellison, Morrison, and Faulkner will welcome Allen's book. In an era when marketability reigns, we should thank his publishers, too, for backing a first novel this challenging, ambitious, and seriously literary.
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