DON’T THE MOON LOOK LONESOME
By Stanley Crouch
Pantheon Books, 546 pages, $26.95
Anyone who has read Stanley Crouch’s provocative, refreshingly candid essays on contemporary culture in collections such as “The All-American Skin Game” and “Notes of a Hanging Judge” knew that his first novel would spare no one.
The man thrives on startlingly honest assessments of America’s racially polarized cultural landscape, gleefully shouting out loud what the politically correct dare not whisper.
But in “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome,” Crouch’s fearless and exquisitely lyrical debut as novelist, he raises the stakes considerably. Practically every phony who meanders through American pop culture–from infantile rap artists to musically illiterate jazz critics to brain-dead racists of all colors–gets his, or hers. Crouch is an equal-opportunity puncturer of the pretentious, giving no one a pass when it comes to the subject he holds most dear: life in everyday America, the place where natives and immigrants, celebrities and nobodies, black and white and all shades between mix it up as only a great democracy allows.
All of this, however, is just the Technicolor backdrop for Crouch’s searing chronicle of an aspiring jazz musician, a singer swimming upstream against racism, sexism, snobbism, commercialism and all those other “isms” that perpetually roil American life. Why does Crouch’s protagonist draw such fire? Because she’s white, female and from South Dakota, three biographical facts that shatter just about everyone’s unspoken stereotype of what a jazz singer is supposed to be.
Even Crouch’s detractors–and they are legion–must marvel at the man’s audacity. Here is a black author, who long has waged battle in the urban jungle of Manhattan, presuming to live inside the skin of a white woman raised in the wilds of South Dakota, of all places. Indeed, the device would seem an outrageous conceit, even for a man of Crouch’s intellectual reach, if he hadn’t gone to the trouble of making Carla Hamsun as bracingly real, human and wounded as she appears throughout this book.
Everything that happens in “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome”–its title recalling not only a lyric that Carla sings but a sweet melancholy that hovers over her story–occurs through Carla’s perceptions. The sights, sounds, smells, memories, hurts and occasional, tiny triumphs belong to her, and she ponders them in extraordinary detail.
Crouch, in other words, has gone to considerable lengths to spin this tale entirely inside Carla’s head, creating a novel that’s less important for what happens than for the way events are perceived. So “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome” unfolds almost entirely as a novel of the inner self, taking place deep in Carla’s thoughts and sensibilities. Mere twists of plot, and there are not many, do not count for much here.
Instead, we experience Carla’s life much as we do our own, with every event triggering reminiscences of occurrences or conversations from long ago. When Carla daydreams, blithely free-associating from one seemingly unrelated subject to the next, we listen in.
Despite the stream-of-consciousness quality of this huge bear of a book, however, there’s no doubt as to the progress of Carla’s story. Through vividly detailed flashbacks and memories steeped within memories, Crouch sketches Carla’s journey into the maelstrom of music in America.
Her love affair with Bobo, the drummer who comforts and guides her through the harrowing initiations into the cloistered world of jazz, is about as persuasive a depiction of a mentor-student romance as one could find in the jazz literature. Her romance with Jimmy Joe, a Chicago musician who shows her how to weather the blows all-too-routinely delivered to interracial couples, is a heart-breaker.
But it’s Carla’s do-or-die bond with Maxwell, the black saxophonist who clearly is the love of her life but seems to be slipping away, that drives this book and gives it its purpose. If Carla and Maxwell can find peace and common ground in the battles of the sexes, the races, the generations and you name it, then perhaps there’s hope for us all. If not–if even this profoundly devoted white-black couple can’t survive the tribal warfare that is American racial politics these days–then who on earth can?
That’s the central question of Crouch’s novel, and he addresses it with some of the most heady, passionate, soulful, high-flying, blues-tinged prose this side of Leon Forrest. His language can be salty or obscene, poetic or polemical, but it radiates the joy of doing battle for love and music, the two guiding lights of Carla’s life.
Through Carla, Crouch sounds off on other matters as well, including Arnold Schoenberg, the failures of the avant-garde, Thomas Jefferson, liberal hypocrisy, conservative hypocrisy, Chicago blues, New Orleans jazz, pandering hip-hop, American cultural nihilism and much more. In one extraordinary sentence, which stretches more than a page, he captures the gravity-defying lift of romance more majestically than one previously believed the English language allowed.
As a painter of scenes, Crouch is often virtuosic. In a stunning depiction of a Southern black church service ignited by divine intervention, he says more about the meaning of faith than a pile of religious tomes. And in a harrowing confrontation between a naked but armed Bobo and a group of ignorant racists, Crouch puts fear into everyone’s heart.
This is not to say, however, that “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome” is an easy read. Far from it. The book not only gives its readers considerable credit but demands a great deal as well. Crouch, after all, isn’t merely exploring a love story with shaky prospects; he’s taking on the meaning of art, the purpose of history, the corruption of popular culture, the transcendence of jazz and blues and other formidable issues.
In that regard, Crouch draws upon not just the traditions of black American literature but also the precedents of the soul-searching, 19th Century European novel. Philosophical questions that have rumbled through the centuries obsess Crouch, who addresses them in distinctly American cadences. Still, some tightening of his longest soliloquies might have enhanced their impact.
Yet writers of Crouch’s vision demand a huge canvas. He simply has a great deal to say and is hell-bent on saying it. How much the reader derives from these contemplations depends entirely on the individual, and how much one cares about the fate of man and woman in a troubled nation.
Crouch cares a great deal, and it shows in every glorious riff of this novel.
