Volume 49, Number 15 · October 10, 2002
The Long Voyage Home
By Lorrie Moore
Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature
by Darryl Pinckney
Basic Civitas, 160 pp., $24.00
A New World Order
by Caryl Phillips
Vintage, 309 pp., $14.00 (paper)
In singling out three 'mavericks of black literature' for his new book Out There, Darryl Pinckney, who has written much on black literature in these pages, perceptively and with the animated brilliance of a passionate reader (he is also the gifted author of the novel High Cotton), has employed a working definition of 'maverick' that includes the phrase 'a striking eccentricity of purpose.' They are words that are as good as any and more apt than most to describe the work of the Jamaican journalist J.A. Rogers, the expatriate American memoirist Vincent O. Carter, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the contemporary British novelist Caryl Phillips. These are, at any rate, the three writers whose literary lives inform the pages of Pinckney's collection, and though their work and biographies are treated with Pinckney's own eccentricity of approach (the essays were originally lectures given at Harvard and will seem, perhaps, brief for those readers seeking comprehensive details of a writer's childhood or formative romances), they are full of great personal feeling, intellectual curiosity, and original, groundbreaking research.
Review, 3134 words
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