Finding Makeba - Hardcover

Pate, Alexs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399142002 ISBN 13: 9780399142000

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 1996

Synopsis

Ben Crestfield never meant to become one of those African-American men all the statistics talk about: the ones who father children and disappear. He loved his beautiful wife, Helen, with all his heart, and his daughter, Makeba, was his greatest joy.
Ben also had dreams, and talent. He wanted to be a writer, to make a difference, to tell the kinds of stories that never seem to get told. But Helen wanted a house, another baby...Ben felt the soft vines of her love wrap around his neck until he gasped for breath. And so one night, as Makeba played with her stuffed toys and tried to sleep after all the shouting, Ben tiptoed into her room and said good-bye.
That was the end, for Ben. His knowledge of his own failure - such a predictable, contemptible failure - built a wall of shame that he thought would keep him from his wife and child forever. He lived alone and wrote.
Ben was right about his talent. He sold a novel. His publisher sent him on tour. He sat in bookstores, signing copies, and one day looked up to see a girl facing him. "Sign it for Makeba Crestfield," she said, and Ben recognized his own soft features, his own warm brown skin.
As father and daughter struggle to speak the truth to each other, they work toward spiritual healing and toward becoming a family for each other.

About this title

About the Author

Alexs Pate teaches at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota.

Reviews

In a Philadelphia bookstore, African American writer Ben Crestfield asks a young woman for her name so that he can autograph a copy of his first novel for her. When she replies, "Makeba Crestfield," he realizes she's his only child, the daughter he hasn't seen and he left her mother when Makeba was 10. Ben's novel is the thinly disguised story of his marriage to 19-year-old Helen, who was pregnant with Makeba when he was a 22-year-old part-time English major studying on the G.I. Bill in the 1970s, and how the relationship unraveled over the next decade as he tried to be both an artist and a responsible family man, churning out copy at an ad agency to pay the bills. Makeba, in turn, hands Ben a letter and a journal in which she has recorded her reactions to his version of events. The ensuing narrative interleaves Ben's book's chapters and Makeba's journal entries into a dialogue between father and daughter. Pate draws Ben, the passive but possessive Helen and Makeba with keen psychological insight. He's less successful with Helen's mother, Lena, a problematical character who has special powers that seem to combine voodoo and natural paganism. The story is further complicated by the introduction of Ben's personified guilt in the form of a spiritual force called Mates, an entity that exists only to punish whoever unintentionally or deliberately destroys love. Despite its flaws, Pate's second novel (after Losing Absolom, named 1994 Best First Novel by the Black Caucus of the ALA) is a sensitive exploration of an African American male's struggle to be a man.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Journal entries in the form of letters to a father from his daughter, along with an imaginary dog/wolf named Mate who symbolizes the forces that drive couples apart, help Pate (Losing Absalom, not reviewed) establish himself as a stylistic innovator who can also tell a story--in this case about the as yet largely uncharted territory of modern-day African-American fatherhood. In the prologue, 19-year-old Makeba Crestfield shows up at a crowded book signing in Philadelphia; when she finally reaches the front of the line, she confronts the author--for the very good reason that it's her long-lost father who, Makeba thinks, walked out on her a decade before. The rest of the narrative alternates between the background story of Makeba's father, Ben, and her mother, Helen, and entries from the journal Makeba has kept while reading her father's autobiographical novel about fatherhood and about a lifetime spent away from the daughter he supposedly loves. We learn that Ben and Helen met at a Valentine's Day party in 1975, fell in love, and, when Helen got pregnant months later, married. At the time, Ben was an aspiring writer; as soon as he and Helen marry, he finds himself torn between his soon-to-be family and his all-consuming career. After Makeba is born, the tension between Ben and Helen--who resents the fact that Ben can't make a full commitment to marriage or fatherhood--reaches the breaking point, and Ben leaves for a few days to clear his head. When he returns, Helen and Makeba are gone; he doesn't see his daughter again until she appears at his signing. Lena, Helen's mother (who has mystical powers), plays a significant role; for the most part, however, Pate focuses on the misunderstandings and lack of communication that are hallmarks of most broken unions. A topical but effectively engrossing read by an author with the ability to say things in a new way. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ben, a black writer approaching fame and midlife, writes an extremely autobiographical novel. In alternating chapters his 19-year-old daughter, Makeba, abandoned by Ben ten years earlier, responds in angry, passionate journal entries. Ben's story is one of opposing desires that he finds incompatible-following his writerly muse and being a husband and father. Ben chooses art over family. Makeba echoes the fear and confusion of the forsaken daughter, but she also locates the courage to find, confront, and reclaim her father. Pate's second novel (his first was the acclaimed Losing Absalom, LJ 4/1/94) is thoroughly earnest but labored and awkward. It addresses crucial matters of fatherhood, the black literary experience, and the black family experience and invigorates the underappreciated 1970s Philadelphia setting. But it finally tells much more than it shows, articulating its points flatly and repeatedly, and is too facile and blunt to carry its story elegantly. Perhaps Pate's third novel will better reflect his promise. An optional purchase.
Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pate, whose Losing Absalom (1994) won the First Novelist Award of the ALA Black Caucus, here examines "family values" in one long-divided African American household. First novelist Ben Crestfield is on a book tour that takes him to his hometown in Philadelphia, where the final person in the bookstore line is Makeba, the young adult daughter Ben hasn't seen for years. The Crestfield story unfolds in parallel narratives: interspersed between chapters of Ben's first novel, in which he attempts to come to grips with his lost family, are sections of the journal Makeba wrote while she read it. Ben vowed to shatter racial stereotypes when he and Helen fell in love. Already a part-time college student with hopes of becoming a writer, he was overwhelmed by his love for tiny Makeba. He finished school, but supporting a family and serving his art became hard to reconcile, and Ben the writer was not the husband Helen expected. In confronting the father she loves in spite of his absence, spirited Makeba opens a door to reconciliation for two troubled souls. Mary Carroll

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0399142002
• ISBN 13: 9780399142000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244