Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Gone with the Wind
By Darryl Pinckney
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 388 pp., $13.95 (paper)
Lost in the City (1992), Edward P. Jones's first book, is a collection of melancholy stories set in black neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. From story to story, each told with an anxiety-swelling calm, the years go by, beginning in the late 1950s, the era of urban renewal when slums were razed, and ending in the mid-1980s, the time of both crack cocaine and gentrification. Jones offers portraits of various inner-city institutions: the corner grocery, the Social Security office, an apartment house full of old people. His characters range from a vicious petty criminal who burglarizes his father's house after his mother's funeral to a member of a gospel quartet ambivalent at seeing one of the churches they perform in burned to ashes. A late-twentieth-century history of black people in D.C. accumulates in these haunting tales about people who can't escape their circumstances. Geography, the condition of getting stuck, is, indeed, fate.
Review, 5193 words
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