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A review by mattquann
Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
4.0
I wanted to mark the halfway point in my challenge to read a Pulitzer Prize winner every month with an "older" winner, but I was also trying to read more work by black authors in an effort to improve my understanding of racial disparity. James Alan McPherson's 1978 collection, Elbow Room, ended up being an excellent choice because it allowed me a window into the black experience in America that you won't find on many of the "must-read" lists circulating these days. What's more, these stories offer a complexity and nuance that really hit the spot in a time where an international conversation about race is afoot.
The collection doesn't start strong, but after moving through the first story I was taken with McPherson's writing and range. These stories cut across a wide swath of the socioeconomic divide and McPherson handles each with skill and style. The Story of a Dead Man recounts a the life of a gangster and his many exploits as narrated by his cousin prior to a family supper. Meanwhile, I am an American places a black man in the UK navigating a robbery at his hotel, and A Sense of Story presents an open-and-shut murder case as more than it first appears. These twelve stories veer and swerve into different lanes, but each one manages to hit hard. Though the writing is continuously solid, the voice changes throughout these stories and is brought to life by pitch-perfect dialogue.
What I appreciated most about these stories are their ambiguity and refusal to offer easy answers to the reader. One of the beauties of the short story, in my opinion, is that they can leave the reader hanging in mid-air at the end of their telling. McPherson manages to straddle that line between narrative and thematic resolution. Each story poses a question by its end about human nature, black life in the US, religion, or romance in a fashion that kept me thinking about what I'd read long after I'd finished the story. This is never done in a way that needles the reader with overt virtue signalling, but instead invites internal conflict and reflection.
Despite a few stories that didn't land with me, this is a pretty excellent collection. Perhaps it was the pocket paperback, but I felt like each story asked me to think about what I was reading like I was back at school. For me, it made for stories that feel realistic but have massive symbolic and metaphorical grounding. It's the type of book that makes me want to think, discuss, and eventually revisit. For now, I'm going to pack this one up and send it by mail to a friend, but I hope you check it out too.
This the sixth book of my 2020 Pulitzer Challenge
The collection doesn't start strong, but after moving through the first story I was taken with McPherson's writing and range. These stories cut across a wide swath of the socioeconomic divide and McPherson handles each with skill and style. The Story of a Dead Man recounts a the life of a gangster and his many exploits as narrated by his cousin prior to a family supper. Meanwhile, I am an American places a black man in the UK navigating a robbery at his hotel, and A Sense of Story presents an open-and-shut murder case as more than it first appears. These twelve stories veer and swerve into different lanes, but each one manages to hit hard. Though the writing is continuously solid, the voice changes throughout these stories and is brought to life by pitch-perfect dialogue.
What I appreciated most about these stories are their ambiguity and refusal to offer easy answers to the reader. One of the beauties of the short story, in my opinion, is that they can leave the reader hanging in mid-air at the end of their telling. McPherson manages to straddle that line between narrative and thematic resolution. Each story poses a question by its end about human nature, black life in the US, religion, or romance in a fashion that kept me thinking about what I'd read long after I'd finished the story. This is never done in a way that needles the reader with overt virtue signalling, but instead invites internal conflict and reflection.
Despite a few stories that didn't land with me, this is a pretty excellent collection. Perhaps it was the pocket paperback, but I felt like each story asked me to think about what I was reading like I was back at school. For me, it made for stories that feel realistic but have massive symbolic and metaphorical grounding. It's the type of book that makes me want to think, discuss, and eventually revisit. For now, I'm going to pack this one up and send it by mail to a friend, but I hope you check it out too.
This the sixth book of my 2020 Pulitzer Challenge