A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile - Hardcover

McPherson, James Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684834642 ISBN 13: 9780684834641

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Elbow Room shares his observations on a wide range of topics, from the significance of Disneyland, to waiting in airports, to the cruel rituals of fraternity hazing.

About this title

About the Author

James Alan Mcpherson is the author of Crabcakes, Hue and Cry, Railroad, and Elbow Room, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals-including the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Double-Take -- and anthologies such as volumes of The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and O. Henry Prize Stories. McPherson has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Prize Fellows Award. He is currently a professor of English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City.

Reviews

In this unified collection of cultural and personal essays, Pulitzer Prize- winning fiction writer (Elbow Room) and essayist McPherson probes how physical, emotional and moral distance challenge society and its individuals. In essays such as "Disneyland," "Ukiyo" and "On Becoming an American Writer" (some of which have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and elsewhere), he retraces his life's steps from Georgia to Cambridge, Iowa, California and back to Iowa, detailing how his decisions, based on need and principle, nonetheless resulted in estrangements, a messy divorce and bicoastal parenting of his beloved daughter, Rachel. (The image of the author throwing her a rose at graduation, then fleeing to Iowa, is lovely and sad.) Throughout, there's an easy kitchen-table quality to McPherson's style that invites the reader: Sit down, I've got a tale--I used to live in California... or, I wrote an e-mail to my daughter... or, There's a homeless man at a mall in Palo Alto.... Then come the shifts in time, discussions of Shakespeare, analyses of racism, reports on current issues like impeachment and O.J. Simpson, all melding together and leading to a realization that ours is a morally lacking society that substitutes "material goods for spiritual ones" and makes "litigation... our only source of civility." McPherson rejects this society, living instead in a "floating world" of like-minded individuals that substitutes as his "hometown." Yet he yearns for a time of "spiritual civility" for blacks and others, and exhorts people to work toward it. Neither abstract analyses nor observational reveries, these are essays on how to live. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Pulitzer Prizewinning essayist and novelist McPherson (Crabcakes, 1998, etc.), fresh perspectives on such topics as the role of athletes, father-daughter relationships, and the writer Ralph Ellison. As he seamlessly mixes classical tags, literary analysis, and down-home stories about his family in these essays, some of which first appeared in The Atlantic and Esquire, McPherson is also writing about his life as a writer, a father, and an African-American. He explains his decision to move to Iowa City, where he now lives and teaches, by noting its distance from the racist South of his childhood and the Charlottesville setting of his bitter divorce, a place that still retains ``a sense of obligation to something . . . not . . . required by the rule of law. In Disneyland, the most personal essay, he explains why he and his young daughter paid so many visits to the Magic Kingdom. He hoped that in a place where ``the established order of dependability soars up into fields of magic,'' she would learn about those unexpected, magical interventions that transform the darkest moments in life. In other notable essays, he describes Ellison's love for American democracy, a love he compares to Virgil's piety; he contrasts the athletes in his small black college, race-bound Spartan hedgehogs knowing only one way to fight, with his own ambition to be an Athenian fox working against ``the fate of a fixed purpose''; and he notes the growing clash between different ethical systems as immigrants and natives become neighbors. Only in Junior and John Doe does he falter because the arguments he marshals to support the proposition that blacks should reclaim the uniqueness they have lost in recent years are needlessly convoluteda reminder how easy it is to take his polished prose for granted. A rich feast for the hungry mind. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

McPherson follows up on his popular Crabcakes (1998) with another collection of thoughtful essays: some new, some previously published in such journals as Ploughshares, Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire. As in much of his work, the Pulitzer Prize^-winner weaves in his own journey (from the segregated South to early work experiences to Morris Brown College to Harvard Law School to the University of Virginia to the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and the work of writers, ancient and modern, who intrigue him into his reflections on the recent experience of African Americans and, indeed, of all Americans. Whether his subject is Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth or Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the pain of divorce or the pleasures of Disneyland, Othello or Orenthal James Simpson, McPherson offers flashes of unexpected insight; his path often twists and turns, but his side trips are well worth the time and effort. Appropriate wherever McPherson's previous collections of essays and short stories have circulated. Mary Carroll

McPherson (Elbow Room; Crabcakes) teaches at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. His work has been featured repeatedly in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Among his awards he can count a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. This latest collection of essays does not disappoint. The topics range from Ralph Ellison to Mark Twain, from daughter Rachel to brother Richard, from Disneyland to fraternity pledge week, and from a message on a beggar's sign to what it means to grow up black in America. McPherson's topics, in other words, can be anything. It is the breadth of perspective and quality of thought and writing that set his work apart. He draws upon classical antiquity, sociology, Japanese culture, literary theory--whatever he needs to cast the right light on his thinking and experience. He doesn't so much resolve the issues he raises as illuminate their complexity and set them in context. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.
---Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: On Becoming an American Writer

In 1974, during the last months of the Nixon administration, I lived in San Francisco, California. My public reason for leaving the East and going there was that my wife had been admitted to the San Francisco Medical Center School of Nursing, but my private reason for going was that San Francisco would be a very good place for working and for walking. Actually, during that time San Francisco was not that pleasant a place. We lived in a section of the city called the Sunset District, but it rained almost every day. During the late spring Patricia Hearst helped to rob a bank a few blocks from our apartment, a psychopath called "the Zebra Killer" was terrorizing the city, and the mayor seemed about to declare martial law. Periodically the FBI would come to my apartment with pictures of the suspected bank robbers. Agents came several times, until it began to dawn on me that they had become slightly interested in why, of all the people in a working-class neighborhood, I alone sat at home every day. They never asked any questions on this point, and I never volunteered that I was trying to keep my sanity by working very hard on a book dealing with the relationship between folklore and technology in nineteenth-century America.

In the late fall of the same year a friend came out from the East to give a talk in Sacramento. I drove there to take him back to San Francisco. This was an older black man, one whom I respect a great deal, but during our drive an argument developed between us. His major worry was the recession, but eventually his focus shifted to people in my age group and our failures. There were a great many of these, and he listed them point by point. He said, while we drove through a gloomy evening rain, "When the smoke clears and you start counting, I'll bet you won't find that many more black doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, dentists...." The list went on. He remonstrated a bit more, and said, "White people are very generous. When they start a thing they usually finish it. But after all this chaos, imagine how mad and tired they must be. Back in the fifties, when this thing started, they must have known anything could happen. They must have said, 'Well, we'd better settle in and hold on tight. Here come the niggers.'" During the eighteen months I spent in San Francisco, this was the only personal encounter that really made me mad.

In recent years I have realized that my friend, whom I now respect even more, was speaking from the perspective of a tactician. He viewed the situation in strict bread-and-butter terms: a commitment had been made to redefine the meaning of democracy in this country, certain opportunities and the freedom they provided. From his point of view, it was simply a matter of fulfilling a contractual obligation: taking full advantage of the educational opportunities that had been offered to achieve middle-class status in one of the professions. But from my point of view, one that I never shared with him, it was not that simple. Perhaps it was because of the differences in our generations and experiences. Or perhaps it was because each new generation, of black people at least, has to redefine itself even while it attempts to grasp the new opportunities, explore the new freedom. I can speak for no one but myself, yet maybe in trying to preserve the uniqueness of my experience, as I tried to do in Elbow Room, I can begin to set the record straight for my friend, for myself, and for the sake of the record itself.

In 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, I was eleven years old. I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms. In our town the children of the black middle class were expected to aspire to certain traditional occupations; the children of the poor were expected not to cause too much trouble.

There was in those days a very subtle, but real, social distinction based on gradations of color, and I can remember the additional strain under which darker-skinned poor people lived. But there was also a great deal of optimism, shared by all levels of the black community. Besides a certain reverence for the benign intentions of the federal government, there was a belief in the idea of progress, nourished, I think now, by the determination of older people not to pass on to the next generation too many stories about racial conflict, their own frustrations and failures. They censored a great deal. It was as if they had made basic and binding agreements with themselves, or with their ancestors, that for the consideration represented by their silence on certain points they expected to receive, from either Providence or a munificent federal government, some future service or remuneration, the form of which would be left to the beneficiaries of their silence. Lawyers would call this a contract with a condition precedent. And maybe because they did tell us less than they knew, many of us were less informed than we might have been. On the other hand, because of this same silence many of us remained free enough of the influence of negative stories to take chances, be ridiculous, perhaps even try to form our own positive stories out of whatever our own experiences provided. Though ours was a limited world, it was one rich in possibilities for the future.

If I had to account for my life from segregated Savannah to this place and point in time, I would probably have to say that the contract would be no bad metaphor. I am reminded of Sir Henry Maine's observation that the progress of society is from status to contract. Although he was writing about the development of English common law, the reverse of his generalization is most applicable to my situation: I am the beneficiary of a number of contracts, most of them between the federal government and the institutions of society, intended to provide people like me with a certain status.

I recall that in 1960, for example, something called the National Defense Student Loan Program went into effect, and I found out that by my agreeing to repay a loan plus some little interest, the federal government would back my enrollment in a small Negro college in Georgia. When I was a freshman at that college, disagreement over a seniority clause between the Hotel & Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union and the Great Northern Railway Company, in St. Paul, Minnesota, caused management to begin recruiting temporary summer help. Before I was nineteen I was encouraged to move from a segregated Negro college in the South and through that very beautiful part of the country that lies between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. That year -- 1962 -- the World's Fair was in Seattle, and it was a magnificently diverse panorama for a young man to see. Almost every nation on earth was represented in some way, and at the center of the fair was the Space Needle. The theme of the U.S. exhibit, as I recall, was drawn from Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways."

When I returned to the South, in the midst of all the civil rights activity, I saw a poster advertising a creative-writing contest sponsored by Reader's Digest and the United Negro College Fund. To enter the contest I had to learn to write and type. The first story I wrote was lost (and very badly typed); but the second, written in 1965, although also badly typed, was awarded first prize by Edward Weeks and his staff at the Atlantic Monthly. That same year I was offered the opportunity to enter Harvard Law School. During my second year at law school, a third-year man na

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684834642
• ISBN 13: 9780684834641
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320