Rails Under My Back - Hardcover

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Rezensionen

Although not completely successful from a narrative standpoint, Allen's first novel is a literary tour de force--a raw, powerful, and often poetic evocation of the modern, urban African American experience and the themes of family and abandonment. Told in alternating voices, this complex tale spans both generations and locales, relating the comings and goings of the McShans and the ties that bind them, with everything linked by a winding railroad metaphor. The story centers on the sons of two brothers married to two sisters whose roots are in the rural South. Hatch is a musician and dreamer, Jesus a wanna-be gangsta whose ambitions demand the assassination of his own father as payback for a ripoff. Not for the timid or the politically correct, this book offers language as blunt and realistic as its characterizations. Not likely to be a "popular" book, it is nonetheless an important one, giving a new voice to the African American experience. For all academic and all but the smallest public libraries.
-David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The charged metaphor of the railroad serves as the spine of this vigorous and imaginative debut, an epic novel chronicling the lives and loves of two brothers, Lucifer and John Jones, and their wives, sisters Gracie and Sheila McShan. Nearly eight years in the writing, Allen's complex, ambitious story of an extended African-American family examines the emotional and spiritual costs of progress and change as the two men grapple with the choices and responsibilities of marriage and parenting. Theirs is a clan always on the move between a big city that's a hybrid of New York and Chicago, Memphis and the West, and the departures and arrivals affect the stability of all, either strengthening the familial bonds or causing chaos and pain. The personalities of the two patriarchs, level-headed Lucifer and restless John, dominate the lengthy, sometimes perplexing narrative. Though different in temperament, the brothers are inseparable, sharing a small flat with their wives at the start of their marriages, celebrating their wedding anniversaries together. Allen tells their stories as well as those of their children, Portia, Hatch and Jesus, in a rapid series of episodes, often recalled in a nonlinear style from different vantage points. The vignettes tell of Sheila and Gracie's upbringing by their kind aunt, Miss Beulah, after they are abandoned by their mother; Lucifer's courtship of Sheila; the brothers' experiences in an unspecified war; the deaths of two of John and Gracie's babies; John's abuse and abandonment of his wife; and Jesus' brutal arrest after a violent confrontation with the family. Allen's multilayered exploration of the themes of abandonment, survival, love, emotional irresponsibility and redemption is original, but his dense, challenging fictional style, intermingling myth, cultural folklore and vernacular language, demands the reader's unflagging attention. For those who stay the course, however, the wondrous journey is rewarding. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A powerful first novel that uses the railroad as a complex metaphorof hopeful reunion but also of separation and dispersalin telling the multi-generational stories of two closely related black American families. Brothers John and Lucius (``Lucifer'') Jones marry sisters Gracie and Sheila McShan, and both couples settle in an unnamed fictional big city that's an imaginative amalgam of New York and Chicago. In a vigorous, jazzy, stop-and-start style that deftly mixes crisp declarative sentences with fragmented dialogue and vigorous expostulations (and that intercuts present and past scenes with brief spasmodic flashbacks), Allen dramatizes both the sources (their families' histories) and the consequences (their children's fates) of the separate paths the Jones brothers follow (``Lucifer and John, brothers in the skin, but no closeness''). The novel both begins and comes to a climax with the streetwise ``business'' that engulfs Gracie and John's embittered teenaged son Jesus, whose temperament contrasts (as do his father's and uncle's) revealingly with that of his cousin Hatch, a soulful youngster bent on becoming a blues musician. The bulk of the story stretches forward and backward (often without helpful transitions, but always bursting quickly into vivid clarity) to focus on various members of the two families' several generations. Most compelling are: stern matriarch Lulu Mae McShan; hardworking, stoical Sheila and religion-bound Gracie; Sheila's daughter ``Porsha'' (Portia), who seeks escape from the city's snares and delusions in a commercial world of ``beauty'' and in her headlong affair with a handsome stud significantly nicknamed ``Deathrow''; and the flickering figure of John Jones, a troubled Vietnam vet and wanderer who cannot remain faithful to his wife or their kinwith devastating results memorably shown in a long, harrowing denouement. An exciting and rewarding successor to the legacy of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Allen worked eight years on this novel, and the result is a very impressive creation: the work of an unusually gifted, disciplined, and more than promising writer. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.