From the Briarpatch File

Publishers Weekly

According to National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Murray (The Hero and the Blues; etc.), the central character of his three novels, Scooter a.k.a. Jack the Rabbit, "has to be nimble or nothing. He's got to be resilient... he's got to be able to improvise on the break." This characterization of life in the "briarpatch" also describes the author's complex voice in this immensely satisfying collection of fiercely individualistic, often perversely positive prose pieces, addresses and interviews. A tireless iconoclast, author of numerous works of cultural critique and a retired college professor, Murray, who prefers the term "Negro" to "black" or "African American," shatters orthodox assumptions about subjects ranging from the Harlem Renaissance to "folk art" ("a product of the no less authentic but least informed and crudest aesthetic sensibility"). He also thwarts common expectations in his critique of authors ("Old Faulkner became and still is my very own idiomatic old Uncle Billy"). Designations like "liberal" and "conservative" don't apply to Murray's finely tuned creativity; in fact, with his exquisite literary sensibility, Murray does not identify himself as political, unlike many contemporary critics. Central to his analyses is what he calls the "blues idiom.... inherited from our captive ancestors." Therein he finds "a context which enables one to deal with the tragic, comic, melodramatic, and farcical dimensions of existence simultaneously" at which Murray is more than proficient. His writings on Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are gifts to the reader. Among these 17 pieces, only two have been previously published (in the Georgia Review and Callaloo). Murray, now 81, iscurrently finishing a collection of his correspondence with Ralph Ellison, who was an upperclassman at Tuskegee when Murray arrived. (Nov. 21) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A novelist, critic, and educator whose aesthetics were influenced by Kenneth Burke, Murray (The Hero and the Blues) has little use for the black arts movement and even less for critical jargon and political correctness. In this collection of book reviews, essays, and occasional addresses, he defends Eurocentrism while celebrating the unique contributions of jazz and the blues to American culture. Some of the pieces are slight, but others, like the review essays on Robert Penn Warren and Louis Armstrong, are powerful and engaging. A couple of interviews with Murray round out the volume, providing interesting details on his education at the Tuskegee Institute, his friendship with fellow alumnus Ralph Ellison, and his development as a novelist and humanist man-of-letters. Offering a nice overview of Murray, this is recommended for comprehensive collections in American and African American studies. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Smooth but scrappy essays on the creation of art, universally and with particular attention paid to the circumstances of the African-American experience. Octogenarian cultural critic Murray (The Seven League Boots, 1996, etc.) is both a keen participant and observer as he deals out his thoughts on the blues, Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro?, New York in the 1920s, the glory of Duke Ellington, among other topics. A rapier intellect keeps these essays quick and nimble, but they leave plenty to chew on in their wake. Murray is especially fascinated by "the matter of processing or stylizing idiomatic folk and pop particulars, which is to say extending, elaborating, and refining folk and pop material up to the level of fine art." Duke Ellington is one example; he transformed indigenous American raw material into universal art by seizing the "indispensable dynamics of the vernacular imperative." In parallel, the author notes that writers such as Faulkner (and one might add Murray himself) conjure a sense of place via idiomatic particulars that can be turned as metaphors. To survive, let alone flourish, Murray argues, one has to think fast, be "ready to swing as if he were a competent jazz musician in the ever unpredictable circumstances of a jam session and also always be ready to riff or improvise on the break." This seems a crucial statement of reality not just for African-Americans, but by extension for anyone living at the turn of the millennium. Especially insightful is a previously published interview (by Sanford Pinsker) in which Murray talks about hearing the jazz in his favorite writers (Kafka, Mann, Auden): "When a sentence sounds right to me, it's probably somevariation of the Kansas City 4/4." Vital and unsparing. Murray taps the wellspring of greatness and posits it as a challenge for artists-in-the-making.