Divine Days by Leon Forrest, with a foreword by Kenneth W. Warren and a preface by Zachary Price. Seminary Co-op Offsets/Northwestern University Press, 1,140 pp., $28.00 (paper)
For the experimental novelist Leon Forrest, the sermon was a major source of inspiration: a flexible form, especially as refined in the African American tradition, that lends itself to both lofty rhetoric and common speech, mingling history, personal observation, moral assertion, and the interpretation of myth—to say nothing of the joy of allusion. In “In the Light of Likeness—Transformed,” an autobiographical essay collected in The Furious Voice for Freedom (1994), he wrote of discovering “a kind of cosmic totality within the monologue of the Negro preacher, which might, in turn, lead to a cosmic consciousness of the race.”
The characters in Forrest’s novels are great talkers—ramblers who become enraptured with their “sagas,” a word that becomes almost a refrain in his hefty fourth novel, Divine Days (1992). Although Forrest was praised by Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Stanley Crouch, and Toni Morrison (who edited his first three novels for Random House), his work remains little known. Divine Days was first published by Another Chicago Press, but a sizable portion of its initial print run was destroyed in a warehouse fire; it was released again by Norton in 1993, and a new corrected edition now incorporates hundreds of changes that Forrest made for the paperback but that were not included because they reached Norton after printing was underway.
takes place over one week, February 16–23, 1966. Its narrator is Joubert Antoine Jones, twenty-eight years old, a thirsty intellectual who has dropped out of college seven times. When we meet him, he’s fresh out of the army and tending his aunt’s bar, Eloise’s Night Light Lounge. A fair amount of Jones’s odyssey consists of managing the bar’s staff and customers, going on assignments for a local newspaper, catching up with acquaintances, fixating on an attractive painter, writing up his impressions of the central figures in his life, and being inducted into a private social club. He is kept busy listening to people ruminate, tell tall
