Synopses & Reviews
In the wake of his watershed novel Divine Days, Leon Forrest began an even more ambitious project, a collection of novellas that he hoped would be the culmination of his life's work and of the fictional world of Forest County, which he had created in his five earlier novels. Although slowed by devastating illness in 1997, Forrest's labor on his masterwork continued; while the novel assumed a focus tighter than he had originally intended, Forrest felt just before his untimely death that he had succeeded in bringing a unified vision to the manuscript of Meteor in the Madhouse.
Meteor in the Madhouse is a novel made up of five interconnected novellas framed by an account of the last days in the life of journalist Joubert Antoine Jones, a character immortalized in Divine Days. The central relationship in the novel is that of Joubert and his adoptive kin and fellow writer Leonard Foster. A symbol of the struggle for freedom and equality, Leonard's search for truthleading him into political agitation, cultish religion, and eventual death from drug addictionimmerses Joubert in feelings of guilt and frustration when he is unable to save his friend and mentor. As Joubert reflects on Leonard's death, he is both haunted and rejuvenated by the characters and episodes of their shared past. We meet the women in Joubert's life: foster mother Lucasta Jones, whose aesthetic and erotic potential goes unfulfilled; Lucasta's sister Gussie, irrepressible in her zest for life; and Jessie Ma Fay Battle Barker, known for her indomitable spirit and largesse. Joubert recalls his visits with Leonard and Leonard's further breakdown in the face of humorous memories from their youth: the behavior of the Deep Brown Study Eggheads who inhabited the wonderfully diverse rooming house near Joubert's alma mater; and the characters frequenting Fountain's House of the Deada funeral home by day and a brothel by night.
As Joubert and his relations tackle the forces of love, lust, alcohol, drugs, violence, and family, Joubert becomes the symbol of the soul's search for authenticity. With introductions by editors John G. Cawelti and Merle Drown, Meteor in the Madhouse emerges as Forrest's most vivid portrayal of the great diversity of urban African American life.
Review
"This rich and wonderful work is Forrest's
Dubliners. . . . Bringing this novel together is one of the great comic gifts in twentieth-century literature . . . but taken to many places even great Joyce could not go. Like Joyce, Forrest was well aware that the belly laugh and the most bitter moment of tragedy are forever twinned." --Stanley Crouch,
New York Times Book ReviewReview
"I was, to put it mildly, deeply moved that in his last days, terribly weakened, his words rang true and so strong." --Studs Terkel
Review
"He spoke and wrote out of the conflicted heart of Chicago but found a transcendent emotional jurisprudence in the heart and soul of the blues/jazz idiom that was his birthright from the bars and juke joints that shaped his perspective on the human condition." --James Alan McPherson
Synopsis
Forrest's long-awaited last work follows the last days of journalist Joubert Jones and his long relationship with his friend and mentor, the idealistic and doomed poet Leonard Foster.