The Women.

The Women is the story of the "Negress," which until now has had "no primary text." Hilton Als has written his book to try to respond to the "existential debate that consumes every writer: Who am I?," and to remember the Negress and her motion through the world - his mother and sisters; Mrs. Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X; fag-hag Dorothy Dean and her "quest for vengeful independence"; and Harlem Renaissance dandy enabler Owen Dodson.

To write the story of the Negress in all its complexity is also to write about pain's "meaning"; style; niceness; "the moment when Negro social life devolved from Negro to black"; "reflection and isolation"; and "the knowledge that what divide people are not the dreary marginal issues of race, or class, or gender, but this: those who believe friendship and love dispel our basic aloneness, and those who do not." In other words, as opposed to the fake and statistical, as opposed to "non-think speak," this is an essay about the real, written against the insipid.

The Negress demonstrates how the intricacy of mind relating to body is negotiated through language and silence. Als' task for himself is to listen and to record, without lying, the language and silence (thought, voice: "reflection") that the Negress uses to make "the world confront its definition of her." As a Negress, his mother's son, Als has no truck with "euphemism." He writes of his mother, "She could have been a great writer. I have never been comforted by the idea that writing her narrative down, in fragments, is at all equal to the power of her live-while-trying-not-to experience. She is so interesting to me - as a kind of living literature." The Negress, as Als observes of Mrs. Little, often does "not write the book we need"; instead, she lives it. Even in the case of Dodson, who did publish books, it was not really his books (in which he, like many others, "forfeited his vision for the sake of Negro respectability, writing what he felt should be said instead of what he wanted to say") but his bygone glamour and body in pain (like Als' mother's) that wrote things most clearly.

Negressity exists in complicated relation to the staunch, the serious, and the difficult - qualities connected to a femininity that will make of you a gorgeous mess or a mother in history, as delineated by Little Edie Bouvier Beale in the Maysle brothers' brilliant Grey Gardens; by Jane Bowles, a Negress, in Two Serious Ladies and even more bluntly in her life; or by David Plante in his superb Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three, which resonates throughout The Women, a pebble in its tidal pool, and whose title could serve as Als' subtitle. George W. S. Trow's remarkable study of the '70s, Within the Context of No Context, provides Als with an epigraph; he in turn provides Trow's essay with the recognition it is long past due as an overlooked ur-text that shows, as Als' own book does, "reflection" about culture placing now in relation to its past to be the surest method for finding a stable grid from which to ask how "I" comes to be "I," a question too often junked for the ease of group activities, of which writing and thinking are not.

An antidote for much of the ill reason (e.g., Leo Bersani in Homos, bell hooks in just about anything) passed off as thought, Als' book, because of his caring attentions to minds "attracted to self-expression as it is filtered through an elliptical thought process," his "desultory interest in fact" and "profound interest in what the imagination can do," has many ramifications. Certainly among the most salubrious is his reminder to all who mistook the impetus for art to be ideology, duty, or redemption: from his favorite older sister's sartorial flair and "extreme makeup" he "learned what the moral impulse behind making art was: doing it for yourself because it expressed bits of this, bits of that, all making up a person." Als' work concerns what is required to take those bits, that person, out into the world. It means not studying the poetry and piano teacher's lessons in romanticism but the point-blank actuality that interests you more: "the woman's matted wig, her bad teeth, and her intractable bewilderment."

This tender and brave book, whose scope is "life in this common world," is made up of beautiful sentences and paragraphs, balm. Among its many beauties is a parenthetical aside about Als' mother near the close of the first section: "(I was so lonely knowing her alive; now that she is not alive, she is everywhere, like words.)"

Bruce Hainley contributes regularly to Artforum.