Volume 5, Number 12 · January 20, 1966
Out Our Way
By Bernard Bergonzi
The System of Dante's Hell
by LeRoi Jones
Grove, 154 pp., $3.95
The Gold Diggers and Other Stories
by Robert Creeley
Scribners, 158 pp., $3.95
The Theologian
by William Harrison
Harper & Row, 211 pp., $4.95
Thumbing a lift from Dante is evidently getting fashionable. First, there was Robert Rauschenberg; and now LeRoi Jones uses the descending circles of the Inferno as the structure of an autobiographical novel about a Negro childhood and adolescence in Newark, N.J. This scaffolding gives the book an ambitious appearance, but it doesn't seem to me to serve much organic function, except, possibly, providing guide-lines to the author's memory and imagination. Certainly, the reader can do without it: the Hell that Mr. Jones writes about is terrible enough without bringing in factitious echoes of Dante. Early on Mr. Jones gives a brutally uncompromising warning: 'This thing, if you read it, will jam your face in my shit. Now say something intelligent!' Faced with a challenge like that, the reviewer needs all the help he can get; fortunately, Mr. Jones makes his intentions clear in a short epilogue to the novel called 'Sound and Image':
Review, 1565 words
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