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Overview
Hal Hardaway is a young black executive, struggling to get along with Corky Winterset, his white girlfriend, who holds him in "constant suspicion of machismo." Walker DuPree, Hal's former roommate, is wrestling with his mixed racial heritage while trying to avoid marriage to his persistent black girlfriend, Sadie Broom. Dr. Emmett Mercy, self-help guru and author of Blactualization: Everyday Strategies for Reconnecting with Your Authentic African-American Self, is obsessed with gaining fame and fortune - at any cost. Meanwhile, his wife LaTonya shares a secret, sordid history with Hal. The story moves from New York to Paris, from Amsterdam to Craven, Delaware, finally culminating on the eve of one of the defining events of our time: the verdict in O.J. Simpson's criminal trial.Editorials
Vanessa V. Friedman
Think Waiting to Exhale with a sex change and less humor...—Entertainment Weekly
Library Journal
Whether he's writing fiction (The Last Integrationist) or nonfiction (Bourgeois Blues), Lamar cuts through to the controversies surrounding the African American experience. Here, three black men deal with issues of interracial dating and heritage at the time of the O.J. Simpson trials.Vanessa V. Friedman
Think Waiting to Exhale with a sex change and less humor... -- Entertainment WeeklyKirkus Reviews
"What is a black man" is the question that opens Lamar's second novel (after The Last Integrationist), written, it seems, to prove that whatever answers we might give aren't going to match the lives real people in novels lead. Here, though, Lamar's people don't really grow in the 20 years of the story, which follows three couples from their college years up to 1996, touching, on the way, many familiar flash points in America's continuing wrestle with race relations. The opening set piece places five men - Hal Hardaway, Walker Dupree, Jojo, Dr. Emmett Mercy, and Charlie Beers - at Dr. Mercy's Black Pride seminar. Each is having trouble with his partner, and finding out who to love becomes the major thrust of their search for identity, sexuality appearing to be the defining feature of identity. Hardaway is a "buppie" executive with an African-American corporation who struggles in his relationship with Corky Winterset, his white girlfriend. Walker is a graphic artist who lives in the ongoing twilight of drifting ambition, occasional light drug use, and irresponsibility that dismays his black girlfriend Sadie. Dr. Mercy is also an ambitious, self-absorbed egoist who aspires to climb through white society by dispensing "official" black views on current events. As in a lot of fiction featuring multiple couples, none of the original pairings here is right, and the plot shuffles the pairs into their proper arrangements. Lamar's use of cultural signposts (the O.J. trial; Marion Barry's travails, etc.) helps him trace the various, often conflicting, views of his characters. But this is a weak substitute for the actual creation of character, and by confining the struggle for identity to thequestion of finding sexual rightness, the author is forced to leave many other societal aspects of racial identity (e.g., economic disparities) out of consideration. Lamar's conclusion seems to be that everyone is an individual, itself something of a cliché. What remains, then, is the search for satisfying sexual relationships, and, in exploring this, the author takes few risks - and offers few insights.Book Details
Published
February 1, 1999
Publisher
New York : Crown Publishers, c1998.
Pages
343
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780517704073