Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Phillip Page. Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction. Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 256 pp. $18.00.

Phillip Page's book focuses sharply on a theme which has acquired increased importance in late-twentieth-century American cultural studies and which has always been close to the center of African American literature--the search for revitalized community in a modern world characterized by social fragmentation and personal alienation. Examining representative works by Ernest Gaines, Gloria Naylor, Charles Johnson, Toni Cade Bambara, and John Edgar Wideman, Page argues that these writers are united by "the rich intersubjective web of African American culture" and employ a wide variety of modernist and postmodernist techniques to express a vision of life which is liberatingly social. Despite a dominant culture which is "multiply fractured," these five writers have worked beyond the "divisions" of American life and have fashioned a significant body of fiction which does the useful "cultural work" of helping "Americans Ito] imagine better selves and a better nation; to move beyond confining absolutes into a more to lerant, open-ended, and flexible communality."

The book is lucidly written and admirably free from the jargon and undigested abstraction which have marred so many critical studies in recent years. And it is persuasively argued and thoughtfully presented, supporting its ideas with meticulously detailed, wonderfully nuanced readings of important texts. (To borrow a metaphor from Frank Lentriccia, this is not "high-flying" criticism lost in clouds of abstraction but "low-flying criticism" which is acutely aware of the intricacies of the literary ground over which it moves.) Best of all, it is not oversimplified or thesis-driven. The ideas informing Page's book are complex and densely textured, and he applies them intelligently not only to explore important common ground among the five writers but also to examine how each writer is a unique individual who defines African American community in different ways.

Wideman, for example, examines the tension between the individual and society, and his individual novels and memoirs respond to this tension in many different ways. This "tug between connection and separation" sometimes affirms integration into the community but just as often leaves his central characters either alone or ambivalently suspended between the demands of self and society. Naylor's stories and novels, on the other hand, are split in different ways: Her realistic fiction, such as The Women of Brewster Place, end in isolation while her visionary novels, such as Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, conclude with a "reweaving of the hitherto damaged social fabric." Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters imagines a visionary city of the future which heals modern man, making clear to individuals their "invisible ties to all other human beings." Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, however, are centered in metafictional journeys which enable people to move beyond egoistic perceptions which separate t hem from others and to assume multiple perspectives which help them to be social beings fruitfully connected to others. Finally, Ernest Gaines's starkly realistic stories and novels focus on "disturbing events" sending "shock waves through the interracial community" which ultimately destroy the status quo and lead to the possibility of establishing a new social order.

An important strength of this book is Page's ability to engage in formal analyses which are not merely clever but are altogether functional; that is, integrally related to the content of the works being discussed. His masterful analysis of the many levels of storytelling in Wideman's work reminds us that the author envisions the just society as a world which listens to and honors "all stories," not just "one preferred story." Page's complex discussion of the experiments in point of view undertaken by Naylor and Johnson, likewise, underscores the belief of both writers that a healthy community is composed of a myriad of perspectives and not one dominant or "monologic" world view. And his subtle analyses of how each of the five writers abandons clock time in favor of experiencing a nonlinear, Bergsonian continuum of past, present, and future is central to the belief of each writer that the past must be experienced as a living flow rather than a static absolute if we are to use the past creatively to enrich the present and envision a hopeful future. Page is therefore quite right when he concludes the book by making a clear connection between the formal artistry of these five writers and the vision of America which emerges from their works, arguing that these works finally "become paradigms of the open and polyvocal communities that the characters rediscover and create."

Like all books, Reclaiming Community is not perfect. The chapter on Gaines, although solid, offers few new insights into this still underappreciated writer. The chapter on Naylor is much too pessimistic in its interpretation of realistic work such as Brewster Place and too optimistic in its interpretations of her visionary novels such as Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe. And throughout the book Page curiously leans too heavily on Derrida's theories, sometimes warping individual works by doggedly insisting that they illustrate Derridean concepts.

These quibbles aside, Reclaiming Community in African American Fiction is an impressive achievement and will take its place among the better studies of African American fiction done in the past ten years. (This indeed places the book in excellent company.) It not only provides refreshingly balanced, nuanced interpretations of a wide range of individual texts but shows in a very clear way how they are a "family" of works arising from a group of writers who draw great strength from being members of a living community.