Synopses & Reviews
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.
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"[T]here is but a threadbare story, and almost no plot whatsoever....Far more shocking...is the author's overall insensitivity to language....Despite the author's generous efforts, rhythm is what is missing from this novel." James Campbell, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Stanley Crouch's first novel, audacious and outrageous, is worthy of the bold iconoclast we know from his essays." Harold Bloom
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"Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is a fresh vision, one that dares to take risks in the name of truth: a novel that brims over with engaging characters and observations of contemporary American life that are so insightful they break the spell of racial ideologies and agitprop fiction that have for too long distorted our understanding of what black (and American) literature can be. It is a novel that we need as we enter the twenty-first century, a stern and rich and correcting vision that will help us, one and all, to create a more humane America." Charles Johnson
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"A bold epic by a man who still feels, cares, thinks, and believes. Who better than Stanley Crouch in this country at this time to lay out the feast of American passion and paradox?" Bharati Mukherjee
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"[This is] the American novel, the novel we've been hoping would be written about what happened to all of us and our country since the 1960s. Stanley Crouch, the most savvy chronicler of the American soul in all our hues, knows, like Balzac, Faulkner, and Ellison, that the vitality of the novel means putting the real 'stuff' in it....He is absolutely brilliant in his knowledge of how men and women talk, think, touch, and feel each other." Barbara Probst Solomon
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"Like the modernist masters with whom he is in dialogue Charles Baudelaire, Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, and Charlie Parker, to name but a few Stanley Crouch has given us an exquisite meditation on Western aesthetics, the artist's vocation and the sensual pulse of urban life....In Carla, one of the most original characters in contemporary literature, this complex novel gives us the portrait of an artist and a lady who quietly challenges us to rethink the meaning of love." Farah J. Griffin, Columbia University
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"Sometimes a bad novel is a gift. This is particularly evident when that novel is written by a writer as ambitious as Stanley Crouch. Here is a book with much to say about three of our culture's most important social and literary themes race, art, and love; and, when one has sifted through the bombast and the clumsiness to the truisms that lurk at the heart of this big book...one does see what is wrong with American society in general and with American literature in particular." Dale Peck, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
About the Author
Stanley Crouch has been a contributing editor to The New Republic¸ is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, and is a frequent panelist on television and radio talk shows. He is the author of Always in Pursuit, The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a staff writer for the Village Voice, he is artistic consultant to jazz at Lincoln Center. A recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Crouch lives in New York City.