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Stanley Crouch's gloriously bold first novel provides an intimate and epic portrait of America that breaks all the rules in crossing the boundaries of race, sex, and class. Blonde Carla from South Dakota is a jazz singer who has been around the block. Almost suddenly, she finds herself fighting to hold on to Maxwell, a black tenor saxophonist from Texas. Their red-hot and sublimely tender five-year union is under siege. Those black people who oppose such relatonships in the interest of romantic entitlement or group solidarity are pressuring Maxwell, and he is wavering. As Carla battles to save the deepest love of her life, her past plays out against the present, vividly bringing forth a startlingly fresh range of characters in scenes that are as accurately drawn as they are unpredictable and innovatively conceived.

"[T]here is but a threadbare story, and almost no plot whatsoever. Most of the characters are bundles of moral certainty, variously deficient in the skills of conversation but prolific in assertion, declamation and opinion--opinion that will seem largely familiar to readers of [Crouch's] nonfiction....Far more shocking, in 'a novel in blues and swing,' is the author's overall insensitivity to language....Despite the author's generous efforts, rhythm is what is missing from this novel."

James Campbell, New York Times Book Review, 04/30/2000

"For 544 pages, Crouch struggles mightily to get inside the head of this former cheerleader from the Plains, trying to figure out what a nice girl like her is doing hanging with a bunch of Negroes in a jazz cellar. It's a remarkable coming of age story....[The novel] evoke[s] the spirits of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, for Crouch clearly aspires to the seamless rhythms and time-tripping paradiddles of Ellison. Unfortunately, there is some bad philosophy...and some even worse writing....But Crouch is a powerful thinker and word-meister, so the sins are balanced by moments of grace. Occasionally the fiction-maker and the scholar meld in that perfect forge of the novel and create passages of intellectual and poetic power."

Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 05/14/2000

Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing: Search Results