Crabcakes: A Memoir - Hardcover

McPherson, James Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684834650 ISBN 13: 9780684834658

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

The author discusses his struggle with a series of devastating personal setbacks that kept him from writing and his current reemergence at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop

About this title

About the Author

James Alan McPherson is currently a professor of English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City.

Reviews

McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning short-story collection Elbow Room (1977), writes here with an astonishing range of language and emotion. Having previously addressed the black experience in America on many levels, he now tells a profoundly personal tale of displacement and discovery that is poetic and universal. The life described in this volume comes into focus in a moment of retrospection, in a bitter season of doubt. ``Life itself'' had become his enemy, he writes: ``I sought to control its every effort at intrusion into my personal space''--space that was almost entirely confined to his bed, ``in which I perfected my escape from life into an art.'' Remembering the seasons of pain and repair in a lifetime of missed opportunities, he returns repeatedly in this account to Channie Washington, his longtime tenant, a nurturing, self-reliant, and deeply religious woman who represented sanctuary--``the place where you pause to get your bearings for the road.'' For McPherson, the present beckons to memory slowly, seductively, revelation then coming into Proustian clarity with a crabcake or the sensual gait of a brown-eyed woman descending a stair. The fish market of a Baltimore neighborhood where he first savored crabcakes, the fields of Iowa, where he now teaches, and the streets of Japanese cities, where he sojourned awhile, all gather into a personal monologue that invites us to understand the crossroads he has reached. Ultimately, McPherson finds renewal in simple sentiments. Late in a long conversation-letter to a Japanese friend that runs through the second part of the book, he reminds us that ``if nothing in the future of the present seems permanent . . . one can always focus on . . . the future enjoyment of a Maryland crabcake. Such exercises of the imagination keep hope alive.'' Although its ever-shifting form is sometimes unsettling, this is a thoughtful and life-affirming memoir, unforgettable for its humanity, its gentle pace. McPherson has traveled the world and never lost sight of the inspirational lure of one's origins. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

McPherson, whose many honors include the Pulitzer Prize (Elbow Room, 1978), is currently a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Spanning two decades, this autobiographical compilation of brief pieces, most reprinted from literary journals, connects his emotional life to his experiences, and his development as a writer. The result is a sort of literate scrapbook of disconnectedly remembered sequences guided by the theme of the search for place and self and anchored in the author's meaningful childhood in Baltimore?home of those famous crab cakes. An African American, McPherson explores the universal conflict of good and evil, racism and common humanity, as he traces his own footsteps, ultimately coming to the realization that the interior landscape is the only terrain worth exploring. This dramatic memoir reaches for the essence of life in search of an epiphany. Highly recommended for literary collections of academic and large public libraries.?Richard K. Burns, Hatboro, Pa.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684834650
• ISBN 13: 9780684834658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288