Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.

Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 245 pp. $14.95.

Ernest J. Gaines's fiction, while widely admired by a broad range of readers and scholars since the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971, has never received the full critical attention and appreciation it deserves. However much his work is praised, it is rarely placed among the first rank of modern American and African American writing. Mary Ellen Doyle's Voices from the Quarters hopefully will reverse the trend since it, more than any previous study, does real justice to the extraordinary craft and wisdom of Gaines's impressive body of fiction, ranging from the publication of Catherine Carmier in 1964 to the appearance of A Lesson Before Dying in 1993. Doyle's penetrating analyses of the full range of Gaines's short stories and novels offer powerfully convincing evidence for her claim that Gaines is a "major American--and black--writer."

What sets this book apart from previous studies is Doyle's skillful use of a variety of critical methodologies to capture the art, depth, and complexity of Gaines's vision. Just as Gaines has distilled a richly nuanced vision of African American life by drawing upon a great multitude of voices and perspectives, Doyle uses a wide variety of critical tools, including formalist, historical, cultural, and feminist criticism, to provide a broad and balanced assessment of Gaines's writing. Her first chapter, "Place, People, Personal Experience: The Louisiana Thing," contextualizes her study by describing in minute detail the "terrain, history, and culture" of Gaines's world, that part of Southwest Louisiana which fired his imagination and centered all of his published fiction. The remaining chapters continue to draw upon Doyle's extensive knowledge of Gaines's cosmos and focus sharply on close readings of individual novels and short-story collections, grounded in the belief that "no critic of Gaines can avoid formal criticism and still be true to his work." But what makes these wonderfully detailed and wisely nuanced analyses so satisfying is Doyle's avoidance of the bloodless abstractions which have often plagued formalist criticism, as she always makes seamless connections between Gaines's artful techniques and his richly imagined, densely textured fictive world.

For example, her masterful analyses of the formal intricacies of Gaines's use of point of view in The Autobiography of Miss lane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying are deeply rooted in her knowledge of black oral tradition, dating back to slave literature and extending up to the porch talk which fascinated Gaines as a young man and inspired him as a mature writer. She sees Gaines's increasingly sophisticated uses of narrative voice not simply as a series of clever literary strategies but as a powerful means to probe a deeper, more fundamental set of truths about African American experience. Likewise, her meticulous discussions of the progressively more complex fictional structures which Gaines employed are tied to his desire to explore his vision in ever more dramatic and perceptive ways, uncovering deeper layers of experience as his technical capabilities developed.

Doyle therefore sees Gaines's work unified not only by his mastery of fictional technique but also a parallel' thematic development which has been a progression from simple questions about definition of manhood to penetrating explorations of possible answers, to a final defining portrait of humanity as unselfish concern for the happiness of others." His apprentice stories published in college magazines focused on "boys learning to be men" but concluded with trauma and disorientation rather than deepened awareness or useful lessons. His first two published books, Catherine Carmier and Love and Dust, portray male characters who are damaged by mistaken notions of masculinity centered in egoism and violence. Doyle stresses that it is with the writing of The Autobiography of Miss lane Pittman that Gaines is able to envision genuine manhood inspired by the example of heroic women and rooted in an ability to reconcile individual acts of courage with genuine concern for others as it is learned from communal wisdom, "voices from the quarters." Gaines's last two novels, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying, give the fullest expression to his mature vision of manhood. It is ultimately revealed in the "love and relationships" which are created by "an immense change from blindness to vision and from vision to voice and action."

The product of almost twenty years of painstaking field research and broad literary study which thoughtfully engages nearly every significant piece of the critical response to Gaines, Voices from the Quarters is an impressive achievement which takes its place among the very finest studies of African American literature. Indeed, Doyle's critical skills reflect the virtues of Gaines's creative work since both are characterized by a remarkable breadth, depth, and resonance. No serious student of Gaines and American literature can afford to miss reading and pondering this superb book.

Robert Butler 

Canisius College