For one thing, the strengths in a Denis Gray novel---engaging
eye for home-spun detail, authentic historical settings, authoritative you-are-there
reportage, intriguing one-two punch of dialogue and explication, a wide range
of African-American characters---are even stronger in his latest outing, Black Bloods. Like that evocative cover art by Charles Lilly, Gray's got the Nineteen Twenties
in Manhattan roaring wild in high life and low with complex characters holding
secrets that will undo the best of their schemes. Two more things happen and I
offer these as words of praise and warning: At page one, prepare to read it to
the end; his plot turns are diabolical, and the result is a book I could not afford
to put down---the last 25 pages are the fastest.
For all of its narrative
brilliance, however, the story is not merely about a confidence game; the story
itself is a confidence game,
inseperable from our own American history. The result is an experience that awakens
a moral urgency and collapses opposites like Wall Street and Strivers' Row,
love and hate, white and black, top and bottom, pass and fail. Gray offers us a
marvellous insight into how twisted race is in our heritage, but in his parable
style he reveals a way to see it, as Joni Mitchell put it, "from both
sides now."
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