Overview
Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is a staggering achievement, an unprecedented American epic that brilliantly explores the fault lines of race, ethnicity, sex, and class in our society -- as dramatized by a five-year, interracial romance.
Carla is a talented jazz singer nearing forty. Maxwell is a renowned tenor saxophonist, the man Carla deeply loves and wants to marry. But Maxwell, who is black, finds himself increasingly at odds with the notion of lifelong togetherness with a white woman, as he yields to group pressure. While they are visiting his parents (whom Carla hopes to win over in her struggle to keep Maxwell in her life), scenes from Carla's past play out against the present, and we begin to appreciate the astonishing arc of her life.
From South Dakota to Chicago, from New York City to Houston, from crack houses to art shows, churches to jazz clubs, open plains to unfettered city streets, Carla relentlessly pursues her artistic vision and authority as each of her love affairs reveals who and what she is -- an authentically complex heroine unlike any in our national literature.
About the Author:
Stanley Crouch has been a contributing editor to The New Republic, is an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News, and is a frequent panelist on television and radio talk shows. He is the author of Always in Pursuit, The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a staff writer for the Village Voice, he is artistic consultant to jazz at Lincoln Center. A recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Crouch lives in New York City. Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is his first novel.
Editorials
Randy Michael Signor
This big, sweaty first novel by jazz writer and essayist Stanley Crouch soars like a noisy bird drunk on the bluesy sounds and rhythms of American music. Long elegant sentences take off into the ether, roll and dive and spin, and then halt midair, brought to a punctuated stop with a thumpa-thumpa drumbeat you could dance to. If you heard it on American Bandstand, you'de give it a ninety, with a bullet.— Book