Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing. - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Michael Thelwell

Stanley Crouch. Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing. New York: Pantheon, 2000. 558 pp. $26.95.

Stanley Crouch's recent novel is a revelation. A sho nuff, in yo' face revelation. But I fear not in the way its author intended.1 There are to be found within its pages a number of engaging, original, and skillfully drawn characters. (Unfortunately, the protagonists are not among them.) Then, too, there is the occasional passage of inspired, nicely achieved prose. But finding these nuggets entails the idiot optimism of a traveler trudging mapless through a Sahara of arid, malformed prose, hoping blindly to stumble upon an oasis over the next dune.

Can corporate downsizing have so depleted Random House's stable of fabled editorial competence that they're now reduced to publishing unread manuscripts? Or could this be yet another ploy to demonstrate definitively the inevitable erosion of standards inherent in Affirmative Action? Call me paranoid, but can't you just see the satanic glee of some blue-eyed devil of an editor? "The perfect murder, I tell ya. Give the hanging judge enough rope and watch ol' Mr. Tambo lynch his pretentious black ass and Affirmative Action along with it. Ah guarantee it." Well, if that's the bait those bastards gonna use, they'll catch ol' Stanley, addled by the toxic drug of his terminally inflated ego, every time.

Of course, practical explanations of the novel's logorrhea are possible. It could be that Stanley was being paid by the word--a not uncommon arrangement on Grub Street, where, lo these many years, he has made his residence. Yet another recent sorry example of the triumph of commerce over art, greed over taste? One hopes so. Any writer deserves to be lavishly compensated for the critical ass-whupping this book is sure to earn him.

Whatever the explanation, ironies and embarrassments abound and wonderment increases. What of Crouch's vaunted literary friendships? Could none of that coterie of right-wing literary "illuminati" [sic] whom Stanley has been so shamelessly cultivating for so long not have pulled the brother's coat? "Yo, Stan. Trust us on matters of fictional language. This here be's some jarringly bad writing, yo. Check yo'self before yo' wreck yo'self, Jack."

Could not, should not the monumentally self-absorbed and overrated Saul Bellow have given his abjectly loyal courtier some rudimentary instruction in literary craft? Given his monumental ego, can the Crouch really have failed to notice the alarming evasiveness and tepidness of Bellow's endorsement? Nary a single word about "artistic vision," "genius," or "innovation"--or even novelistic craft or literary accomplishment. Instead, Bellow finds only "relief from ideology's burdens" and "color free facts"? Is this any way to talk about a great work of "Art," Stanley?

As a writer--and a black man--one can't help but be embarrassed for Stanley. But I can't honestly say I'm sorry. Crouch has been for too long an arrant intellectual bully-boy on the black side and a shameless sycophant and poseur on the other. So if he is now ill-served by the public exposure of this work in all its ill-finished ineptitude, it is just a particularly ironic form of poetic justice.

Hithertofore, I have been careful to restrict these remarks to matters of craft, taste, and execution. This restraint is an act not merely of discipline on my part but, oddly enough, of mercy. To publicly engage, with any honesty at all, the manifest shallowness of much of the book's contents requires summoning a quality of sadism that I do not have. I am content to leave that level of gleeful, gratuitous, and unseemly critical savagery to Stanley's fellow travelers over at The New Republic, that right-wing white-boy rag which has afforded El Croucho safe haven from which to launch his unique brand of mean-spirited critical nastiness at black targets.

But there remains abundant cause for still further wonder. Has Stanley's ill-considered publication of this literary leviathan given license to a certain kind of rebarbative white animus toward any stirrings of black cultural ascendancy? Why else would the New Republic and the New York Times have assigned so much space to far-ranging discussions of a work they pre-pronounce (quite accurately) to be both trivial and silly? The low cunning of the Wuzungu again? Swahili proverb: "When you see the Wuzungu [white man] pointing a cannon at a small bird, you can be sure he is really aiming at the elephant behind the bush." But even here, I'm sure Stanley will find a way to claim a victory of the dubious "it-doesn't-matter-what-they-say-so-long-as-they-talk-about-you" variety.

Which has in fact begun to happen. The authoritative New York Times Book Review, thinking, I'm sure, to do faithful Unc' Stan's book a kindness, sought out a Scottish fellow traveler to review it and assigned the scoundrel an entire page to that lofty purpose. You must understand that James Campbell is the bumptious London hack who has tried to make a career, first of denigrating James Baldwin's literary legacy, and later cynically trying to exploit a scurrilous version of Jimmy's private life on stage for profit. So, to the Times editors, Campbell must have seemed Stanley's British alter ego--so to say, a marriage made in Hell.