Customer Reviews

White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming Of Age Black In White America

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I am in the middle of reading the book. The voice of the book is hard to pin down yet it creates someone you instantly feel you know, as very good writing does. That it can do that is striking, since one premise is that the racial divide makes recognition elusive. I recognized a gay voice early. He hinted at not fitting into standard male bonding rituals--sports and interest in women. In a post-script, he comes out, suggesting he wasn't ready to do it in the book. That's interestng on the gaydar front, since I picked up his gayness very early in the book. He tells how boring Monday night was for him as a television addict, since all it had was Monday night football. One part I find interesting is that his account of the bleakness of his home's setting, the lack of connection to many of his "peers," the domestic squalor, conflict, and happiness mixed together, seems recognizable and universal. There is the alienation that coming-of-age stories for people who don't fit into their group typically describe. There is the bond to family that few can disown. Though the writing is very good, it is not quite great prose. But there is a talent for narrative (even when the book is arguable "diffuse" as one writer indicates)and a capacity to recover and report the feeling life had in Trenton for a black family in the 1980s. One sad feature of a book by a very well educated writer is that he uses "laid" for "lay" and "lay" for "lie." That mistake has become ubiquitous, creeping into the speech of people with first-class educations. I wish it could be stopped.

Finally, there is a sense that he was premature to write a memoir. It's true his views are still forming, and he is still experiencing the bends from his movement from a black underclass without prospects (in which his brother is trapped) to a world of privilege that remains mainly white. But he is a good writer so the report from the field, before he is fully matured, is strengthened by the sense of immediacy as he tries to organize the clashing juxtapositions of the worlds that were still making him. And, as a gay man, he has an outsider's perspective on much of what both worlds take for granted.

I write this review not only as a reader but I'm a childhood friend of the author and so the first night I read I laughed so hard I couldn't breath..the next night I cried..And yet with all of those emotions I managed to allow myself to take in his journey through his words...I have since tried to contact Marcus...without success...hopefully he will read this so that maybe I can tell him personally how much I really enjoyed his memior