By the Sea (2001) By Abdulrazak Gurnah

 

An activist friend of mine recently posted on the book By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gurnah, a native of Zanzibar, is a retired Professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. I’ve just finished reading it.

Like most Americans, I suspect, all I knew about Zanzibar is that it is mentioned in the opening theme song of the Patty Duke Show. This lack of information about both the country as well as most African geography, complicated my read. So, like the main character, I accessed maps frequently, and then Wikipedia for historical summary.

By the Sea, fiction, is set in Zanzibar, Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika, a German colony, then a British protectorate), Kenya, East Germany (pre-unification), and the United Kingdom.

The story begins when a 65-year-old man born in Zanzibar arrives from Tanzania seeking refuge status in the UK.  He pretends to not know English and ends up at a refugee center where they will try to determine the legitimacy of his asylum request. His passport indicates his name is Rajab Shaaban Mahmud. He is assigned to a case worker named Rachel, the first friendly, non-bureaucratic person he has come across. Still, he won’t acknowledge that he knows how to speak English. Frustrated, Rachel contacts a professor in London who was an immigrant from Zanzibar years ago named Latif Mahmud, asking his assistance as a translator. After Shaaban hears the name of the translator, he confesses that he does know how to speak English. He tells her he knows the man’s name but seems hesitant to talk with him, quoting from Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby The Scrivener, “I would prefer not to.”

Rachel will persist, and once Latif has heard the refugee’s name he becomes interested in meeting him because Rajab Shaaban Mahmud is the name of his deceased father. Their eventual meeting confirms that the name on the passport Shaaban uses is stolen, his real name is Saleh Omar. They are in fact known to each other, with ugly family histories to rehash. These family dynamics are the heart and plot of the book.

There are multiple other aspects of this book that are interesting: one story is how the asylum system (UK not US) works; another is British colonial rule in East Africa and how its education worked to indoctrinate Africans; and an extensive overview of how independence when it came brought with it violence and corruption as warring factions fought each other for control; as well a first hand account of being an immigrant.

Recommendation: Yes

Ethan Frome (1911) By Edith Wharton

 

When Ethan Frome was published reviewers described it as an unfortunate love story that was not to be. Well, maybe, I guess, for hopeless romantics looking for subplot. Heaven-forbid people read the book for what it actually is, a manifesto on the impact of generational poverty. Or am I being too cynical?

The novella was written by Edith Wharton, an acclaimed author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921 for The Age of Innocence. She is widely recognized as a chronicler of the “gilded age.” One could say Ethan Frome, published in 1911 chronicles the other 98%,

Yes there is a missed love story in the book, but it stands as Exhibit A on what poverty and lack of healthcare does to limit one’s personal options.

Ethan is the son of a dirt-poor farmer/timberman. When his father dies, he forfeits all hopes for an education because he must take care of the farm, the mill, and his mother. When she becomes ill, he must add her care to his daily task list. His outside social contacts in the rural area where he lives disappear due to a total lack of time. Distant relatives “help out” by sending him a woman named Zeena who has become a financial burden for them, to aid in taking care of the mother. He marries her because they need each other, not for love. After the death of his mother, Zeena too becomes ill, and spiteful. Ethan becomes ever deeper in financial ruin. Her family sends a cousin to “help out.” She is a young woman named Mattie that had also become another financial burden, first to them, now to him.

Zeena hates her, sensing competition. Ethan does eventually fall in love with Mattie, unconsumated, but they can’t run away together for lack of money and for his felt moral obligations. Zeena insists Mattie has to be replaced as incompetent. The doctor decides Zeena must have more professional help, another financial burden he can’t afford: the farm, the mill, the his wife, cousin, and now a paid outsider.

Not an uplifting subplot to be found. And it gets worse.

Recommendation: No, professionally written, but deeply depressing.

The Wapshot Scandal (1964) By John Cheever

 

I just finished reading The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever. It is a sequel to his 1957 book The Wapshot Chronicle, a book I liked a lot. Because of that I’ve been eager to read the sequel, confident it would be more of the same, which would have been enough for me. It was that, and then some, hardly your standard sequel.

The first book was set in the fictional town of St Botolphs, MA and tells of the Wapshot family, prominent in the town for generations. It ends at the funeral of Leander Wapshot, for which both of his two sons have returned.

The Wapshot Chronicle

The Scandal picks up several years later, providing a brief review of the boys’ respective stories. Coverly is living on a military base with his wife Betsy and a son. Moses is living the life of a successful businessman, with his wife Melissa in an upscale suburb. Then, some interesting things happen.

Coverly gets a letter from his Aunt Honora, the family's matriarch asking him to visit her. He does, arriving alone by train. When checking in with Aunt Honora she tells him they can’t successfully sell or rent the house he and Moses inherited equally from their parents. The prospective buyers/renters claim the house is haunted.

Coverly goes to the house he grew up in to spend the night. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the ghost of his deceased father. Coverly flees the house, and town, without even confirming to Aunt Honora that it is in fact haunted.

Long stories short: Coverly’s wife Betsy has mental health issues, is prone to fantasy, and holds him responsible for their low standard of living on a military base. Moses’ wife Melissa is a bored suburban housewife who ends up having an affair with a teenage boy named Emile who delivers their groceries. IRS visits Honora because she has failed to pay any taxes for years and they are about to confiscate everything from her.

Next up: Honora (on the friendly advice of a local Judge) withdraws all her cash funds and flees to Europe on an ocean-liner ahead of her arrest, and has an onboard “friendship” with a gigolo stowaway. She will settle in Rome. Melissa, confronted by her husband, will also head for Europe ending up in suburban Rome. And unbeknownst to Melissa, Emile, stressed by it all, will join the merchant marines heading to Europe. Emile ends up in a “meat market” where he is purchased, splitting the funds with the market owner – and of course, his purchaser at the meat market auction is none other than Melissa.

There are multiple “other” escapades in this book, some of which are hysterically funny (Honora’s audience with the Pope for instance). The Wapshot Scandal reads in places as off the wall as though it could have been written by Kurt Vonnegut.

Like I noted earlier, not your standard sequel, but a fun read.

Recommendation: yes. One could read this as a standalone novel, but my recommendation would be to read The Wapshot Chronicle first.

Home to Harlem (1928) By Claude McKay

 

Among the many authors associated with the Harlem Renaissance none looms larger than Claude McKay. His 1928 book Home to Harlem captures the essence of the neighborhood, reputation, and the era. It follows the life of a man named Jake from his last day before departing for military service in World War I, to his return a couple of years later; all of which is instructive for readers then, and now a century later.

McKay is controversial among the Renaissance writers in that he recounted, in detail, the underside of life in Harlem. It was Prohibition era nightclubs, gambling, drugs, booze, and women; but it was also a low-income existence foretelling a dog-eat-dog world of fighting for work, sometimes with your friends. And the demoralizing aspect of men who so often had to rely on women for support, not that McKay’s female characters came out any better or less demoralized.

Jake’s first real job was in the military, shipped to Europe with the hype about fighting to save the world. Only he wasn’t fighting, most Black soldiers weren’t fighting, they were assigned to support services, laboring no different from their jobs back home, only with a steadier paycheck. He discovered that the racism of Europeans was only marginally better than in the States. He learned, felt, that Black soldiers were merely pawns in the White world’s wars with each other.

When he left the military, without discharge, he stayed in Europe for a time working in various port cities as a longshoreman during the post-war reconstruction period. But what he longed for was returning to an environment where Blacks were not a minority, where they had a place of their own. He worked as a ship hand to gain passage back to New York.

Harlem Renaissance

There are a multitude of interesting character profiles in the book. There are also a many issues covered, including: the relationships between women and men; union organizing in for Longshoremen’s Union where Blacks were allowed, but relegated to the worst assignments, and a last-in first-out layoffs policy; marginally better treatment among the Pullman Porters; and the always present topic of black, bronze, and “passing” skin pigments.

Recommendation: Yes, an informative read.

Harlem Renaissance (1971) By Nathan Irvin Huggins

 

One of the most significant chapters in African American history was the Harlem Renaissance, a period of time from the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with the onset of the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition. Today it is remembered by most for jazz music and bootleg liquor. While that is not an inaccurate description, it is an incomplete one.

Harlem Renaissance is a book providing an extensive history of that age and its lasting legacy to Black Americans, and their place in American history. It was written by NathanIrvin Huggins, a celebrated historian, educated at UC Berkeley and then Harvard, where he became a Professor of History, and Director of the W.E.B.DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. Today, Dr. Huggins is synonymous with what academia calls Black Studies. As a history academic it seemed odd that Huggins would author a book on the cultural phenomenon that was the Harlem Renaissance. That choice proved perfect. The book begins by reviewing the American history that led to the resettling of a New York City neighborhood as an enclave of Black Americans.

Post-Civil War and Emancipation, the American South, home to the vast majority of Black Americans, was transformed into the political war zone known as the Jim Crow era, and its birth of a white supremacy philosophy which still rages today. As a result, many Blacks left the South in what is known as the Great Migration, heading north to cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, hoping for a clean start away from Jim Crow laws. (An excellent book on the Great Migration is Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns). Many of these migrants landed in the NYC neighborhood of Harlem, transforming it into what would become a Black “ghetto” – a word not used in Huggins’ book. In sociology terms, ghettos are enclaves of like-people, not necessarily based on economics, a prime example would be the Chinatowns that exist throughout the country.

Important to this migration history is that Blacks from the South were leaving a rural economy for an urban one. In Harlem, the resulting enclave was comprised a bit differently than the others. It was a mecca not only of migrants from the South, but also a large contingent of Blacks from the Caribbean; and a small though significant group of “Free Negroes” born and/or raised in the North, who fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and were educated (teaching Blacks was forbidden in the South) and although they were aware of the dynamics of slavery and Jim Crow, they had little direct exposure to it.  It was, to use another sociology term, quite the melting pot.

Assembling in a neighborhood is distinctly different from forming a community, and that is what the Harlem Renaissance is all about.

This large influx of different peoples brought together a fusion of backgrounds and experiences: the singing and oral folklore of the South, the musical and dancing traditions of the islands, and a small, educated group who would by default assume the role played by the nation’s other “new” communities through the social equivalent of what would become known as settlement houses.  All of this was hampered by a majority-White society, which, while much softer than the South, was still less helpful or inviting than it could have been. Poverty or near poverty was an issue, complicated by being new to an urban environment where employment options were anything but rural.

Still, the “freedoms to be” found in Harlem were cause for celebration, hence the soon rapidly gained reputation for a good party. In the post-war era, followed by the Roaring 20s, this meant Prohibition breaking booze, and prostitution (not unlike elsewhere in the country). This party-like atmosphere created an unparalleled creative energy, snowballing into a cultural renaissance new to Black Americans, awakening literature that was by them, about their experiences, a music scene decidedly different from the American mainstream, and a budding arts & theater scene that grew from support roles to lead characters.

The literary survey in Huggins’ book is extensive. Associated with the Harlem Renaissance are such names as James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and many, many others. Huggins connects the works, the authors, and even the characters in their works, providing a head-spinning commentary that left me gasping for air. 

NOTE: the poster at the beginning of this blog post is not the cover of the book, it is a poster promoting a play opening on September 27, 2025, celebrating the centennial anniversary of the first publication of the Crisis, a Black owned and operated literary magazine.

The book also includes significant biographical information on Carl Van Vechten, a White author, which at first confused me. He is important because the publishing business at the time had little interest in developing a market for Black writers, or marketing to Black readers, so Van Vechten spent much of his time introducing these authors to commercial publishers.

Van Vechten played a second and equally significant role, that of a personal tour guide. Keep in mind that Prohibition was in effect during the era, though only loosely enforced in Harlem. Van Vechten, a fixture in New York’s upper class “society” which gave public face to following the Prohibition law would frequently invite them to accompany him on trips to the nightclubs of Harlem, where they would witness Jazz music and performers, and party along. Eventually sponsoring performers in the Manhattan crowd.

Huggins gives this same in-depth treatment to the Arts Scene and ends with a lengthy and fascinating chapter about the evolution of Black theater from blackface to minstrel shows.

The only aspect of the Harlem Renaissance left out of this extensive survey, is the role of the Black church – a survey that would have to wait for the publication of James Baldwin’s first novel Go Tell It On The Mountain.

Recommendation: Highly recommended.

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) By Nathanael West

 

Last year when I blogged The Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West, my recommendation was a no. I did, however, qualify that critique by indicating I would still read his better-known novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, before writing him off. Earlier this week I did so, fortunately it was a short novel therefore not too much of my time was wasted.

I fail to understand those who “appreciate” West’s work. Both novels were coarse and poorly written, his overview of life is a sad commentary as a style. West is to American literature, what “shock jock” talk shows are to radio … if you have nothing to say, say it loudly and profanely.

Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a newspaper reporter, male, who writes the paper’s advice column. There is, or should I say could have been, a lot that one could work with on that subject, West broached it then failed miserably. Miss Lonelyhearts, the columnist gets achingly depressed by his job, ridiculing his readers, questioning his self-worth. All the while he is ridiculed by his co-workers and an editor who even hold an intervention to try to reignite his cynicism.

West’s formula was to build on the stereotype of reporters as hard drinking, chain smoking jerks; and introducing gross chauvinism and racism, at one point even setting his characters at their hangout tavern relegating them to telling jokes about gang raping a female reporter.

The Day of the Locusts

That this race for the bottom mirrors the same format West used in The Day of the Locusts, leads me to say conclusively, I’ll never read another work by Nathanael West.

Recommendation: Absolutely not.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) By John Cheever

 

Every once in a while I’ll read works by an author who I know next to nothing about. Such was the case when I picked up the collected novels of John Cheever printed by the Library of America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 for a collection of short stories published primarily in The New Yorker magazine.

The Wapshot Chronicle was his first full length novel. Written in 1957, it is set in New England in the post-war era (WWII) and is a family history of sorts. The Wapshot family had generations of prominence in the village of St. Botolphs, an old river town now nearly forgotten to all but summer visitors from Boston.

The family consists of Leander Wapshot, known as the “captain,” his wife Sara, their two boys Moses and Coverly, and Leander’s cousin Honora who is the matriarch of the family and controls the purse strings. Cheever quite skillfully tells each of their individual stories as they progress through their lives, eventually spawning the next generation of Wapshots. Leander, Sara, and Honora are mostly presented in recollections, and the boys are in present tense. The most interesting (to me) is Leander who tells the whole story through a journal he posts in every day, and in his letters to the boys.

The boys, while compatible, are quite different. Moses is slightly older and is clearly the “heir apparent” to the family’s history. He’s sports oriented, destined for college, though at first life beyond the village holds no interest to him. Post graduation he’ll head to Washington DC to a job arranged by Honora. Coverly is more of an introvert, interested in literature, and whose interests are focused anywhere but St. Botolphs. When Moses leaves for DC, Coverly secretly departs on the same train, but with the destination of New York. Both of them will have interesting and improbable lives as they go through young adulthood and marry. This part of the novel reads like a page-turner.

They will return to their childhood home in St. Botolphs for their father’s funeral at which it rains. “Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms by which he lived.” 

In 1964 Cheever wrote a sequel to the Chronicle and titled it the Wapshot Scandal. I thoroughly like the Chronicle, and I am eager to read Scandal.

Recommended: Yes