Volume 21, Number 10 · June 13, 1974
Can You Go Home Again?
By Thomas R. Edwards
If Beale Street Could Talk
by James Baldwin
Dial, 197 pp., $6.95
Train Whistle Guitar
by Albert Murray
McGraw-Hill, 183 pp., $6.95
Another Life
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 152 pp., $3.95 (paper)
'I'd rather be here, than any place I know,' sings the boulevardier of Handy's great blues song, unintimidated by having seen the seven wonders of the white world for he is sure that Beale Street had more than enough life and love for anyone until they closed down the saloons. As an account of black experience in America this has obvious limitations, and the irony in the title of James Baldwin's bitter new novel of black lovers in the repressive hands of white justice tells us clearly enough the point he wants to make. But the novel itself does not succeed in telling a story that convinces us of that point.
Review, 3752 words
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