Singing the Bicentennial Blues: Illinois' Short Fiction Series

BOOK REVIEWS 149 cesses and also produces a real introduction to Marxist critical theory. Both have been badly needed, and are especially useful in this country where, as Christopher Lasch says, "Marxism has served as a form of cultural protest and withdrawal rather than as a method of social analysis." Roger Mitchell Singing the Bicentennial Blues: Illinois' Short Fiction Series Stephen Minot. Crossings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. 166 pages. $2.45. Philip F. O'Connor. A Season for Unnatural Causes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. 116 pages. $2.45. John Stewart. Curving Road. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. 128 pages. $2.45. Gordon Weaver. Such Waltzing Was Not Easy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. 132 pages. $2.45. Once some years ago I heard John Barth say, with an assurance born of writing 800 page novels, that the short story was dead. Somehow, though, the word failed to reach Urbana, where the University of Illinois Press has been busily, and no doubt perversely, transfusing the corpse into a remarkable simulacrum of life through the first four volumes of its new Short Fiction Series. These books share several themes, perhaps reflecting the biases of the series editors . All (except Stewart's) explore the strains of modern American family life; all (except O'Connor's) reflect specifically ethnic or at least regional experience; all (again except O'Connor's) recurrently center on figures driven by a need to test themselves , like Hemingway's bullfighters to hold their purity of line under a maximum of exposure; and all (maybe because their authors are lodged in the academy) dramatize the tensions besetting sensitive intellectuals in a world threatening to emasculate them. In none of these volumes is the tension more apparent than in John Stewart's Curving Road, both because his is the best of the books published in the series thus far and because he is black, responding to the schism felt by the talented black man, caught between his passion for revenge and society tempting him to an easeful acquiescence through that special hypocrisy, which these days it is fashionable to call Affirmative Action. Among Stewart's heroes, Juju, who serves as Showcase Negro in one of the system's institutional cornerstones, puts his own dilemma precisely: Everywhere you turn around you hear them saying, 'Times have changed, haven't they?' Then out trots those ready evidences-black capitalism, minority representation, right-on power to the people and all the rest. Like if that's where the money comes from. (Whatever happened to Tommy Smith? What's become of his children?) Hey, somebody's gon say, Look at you. You're doing all right. Why you're a teller in one of the biggest banks in America. Which is cool-until we start looking at what it took to get me there: two college degrees (nine years of my life in adult education detention ), a bunch of credit-account clothes, some grammar and a body language which camouflages the best in me, and a daily reverence to some incognitos who purportedly know best how the human soul is to express itself. 150 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW This indictment occurs in "That Old Madness-1974," a monologue in which Juju fantasizes a scheme to rob the bank, not for money, but for the chance to kill his tormentors: "Poppity pop pop, baby. Like that. Ten pins; or just the way they did the Indians." The madness is, however, old-not only of long standing but outworn, as inconsequential as the pop, which, while Juju hears in it the report of his gun, suggests no more than a toy. And though his fantasy arises from anger, he knows that, should he enact it, society will dismiss it as madness in another sense: "the neighborhood papers will put that down to my having come from a race of subintelligents with a sub-cultural, underdeveloped, fatherless, deprived background." That Juju bears none of these stigmata intensifies, ironically, his inner conflict. Hailed from a passing car by a white child, in words ("Hey, boy! Hey, boy!") which, spoken by the child's parents, would have enraged him, Juju finds his hand, as he...